Holly Sykes fills this book. Bookmarking the beginning and end with first-person narration, we experience her life as a fifteen year-old runaway and as a grandmother trying to protect her children in a world falling apart at the seams. But in the intervening years we catch glimpses of her from the perspectives of a cast of acquaintances, lovers and friends such as the Bret Easton Ellis-esque sociopathic monster that is Hugo Lamb, a twenty-something egotistical conman intent on scoring against his rich Cambridge cohorts; the work obsessed journalist that is her husband; or the kind and thoughtful Marinus who understands something of her and the part she has to play in a war that is coming to a bitter end.
These stories are eclectic and entertaining, splattering different layers of colour onto a canvas that can enjoyed on their own, but are at their best when viewed from above. It’s also thoughtful, dealing with subjects as diverse as climate change, the attraction of Old Testament religion in dire times and the addictive pull of journalism. There are some superb one-liners in this, possibly his funniest novel, as characters verbally spar, and internalised thoughts are loaded with self-deprecating wit. But although the early chapters have an easygoing charm to them, darker notes start to appear in the cracks, leading through war-torn Iraq to Colombian jails before ending up in a bleak and curiously parochial post-apocalyptic setting for the final chapter.
Although he has brought back characters in other novels, The Bone Clocks is Mitchell at his most overtly self-referential. Instead of being an exercise in fan-service, he manages to make us look at his previous work in a new light. The cryptic cult in the Japanese mountains of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is unmasked as part of The Bone Clock’s mythos as well as beings similar to the mournful anonymous protagonist in Ghostwritten’s ‘Mongolia’ chapter. Elsewhere we see where Luisa Rey ended up after her (possibly fictionalised?) expose of HYDRA in Cloud Atlas and the further activities of Jason Taylor’s cool cousin Hugo Lamb from Black Swan Green as well as a smorgasbord of other callbacks.
The paranormal background that these stories exist in is an almost Stephen King-esque battle of immortal wills that has been playing out over hundreds of years with two warring sides of psychic beings that operate as moral opposites. The Horologists are gifted with eternal reincarnation; while their enemies the Anchorites must constantly drink the souls of psychically gifted children to stay youthful (like King’s True Knot from Doctor Sleep.) If all this sounds a bit much to take in, don’t worry. Mitchell lowers you gently into his fantasy bath, slowly revealing more of the otherness behind the world as you traverse through Holly’s life, looking at her through stranger’s eyes. It seems that Mitchell has already pre-empted some corners of the literary world’s snobby anti-fantasy bias, as the somewhat meta and affectionate needling of Martin Amis in the chapter entitled ‘Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet’ will attest. Hershey, the ‘highbrow’ fiction Amis/Mitchell surrogate is chastised by his agent for daring to stoop so low as to write a fantasy novel.
But Mitchell is not fazed by such accusations – he just wants to write books he is interested in, genre be damned. And that is a brilliant thing, because what he does best is to write wonderful and fantastical novels that can share the best aspects of all genres floating about, melding them into a glorious gestalt entity that exists on its own terms. This is a novel easy to recommend to fans of Mitchell’s previous work, but that’s preaching to the choir. The Bone Clocks is a rare book with all of its limbs in different pastry dishes, and an entertaining ride with something for everybody, fan or newcomer alike.