Mind Picker: The Bone Clocks

The young hold out for a time, but eventually even the hardiest patient gets reduced to a desiccated embryo, a Strudlebug…a veined, scrawny, dribbling…bone clock, whose face betrays how very, very little time they have left.

I was gobsmacked when I finished reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: so thoroughly unlike anything I had ever read before, I closed the book slowly, unable to immediately decide whether I had just read a work of complete genius or if I had been hoodwinked by some clever literary legerdemain. The stories, nested like a matryoshka doll, were a perfectly constructed universe; from familiar past to distant future. Had I been goodreads-rating at the time, my first and final impressions would have warranted five stars -- even if Cloud Atlas was a fraud, I was a willing dupe. Based on that enthusiasm, I then read, greedily, everything else Mitchell had written, and would have given them all four or five stars; I love David Mitchell. Now comes The Bone Clocks, his first book that I've read as it's released, and after seeing that it was long-listed for the Booker Prize, I knew I would love this book, greedily prolonged my anticipation by ploughing through the rest of the list first, and then…I was so disappointed. I did not love The Bone Clocks.

I was hooked at the beginning: the story of 15-year-old Holly Sykes, a normal if slightly rebellious girl from rural England, set in 1984 (when I was also in high school), was interesting and relatable to me. When the slightly fantastical elements were added -- the Radio People and Miss Constantin -- I was reminded of Haruki Murakami (another of my all time favourite authors), and I was still totally on board; so far, so good. The storyline then jumps ahead to 1991 and focuses on Hugo Lamb, a seemingly affable university student and, in a move that I loved, the cousin of the main character from Mitchell's Black Swan Green. In this section, we also meet Richard Cheeseman, a fellow student who is slaving away at his first novel, and I found this plot outline to be a hilarious sendup of Mitchell himself:

"My hero is a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman, working on a novel about a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman, working on a novel about a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman. No one's ever tried anything like it before."

"Cool," says Jonny Penhalgion. "That sounds like --"

"A frothy pint of piss," I announce, and Cheeseman looks at me with death in his eyes until I add, "is what's in my bladder right now. The book sounds incredible, Richard. Excuse me."

We soon learn that Holly Sykes appears in Lamb's story, too, and eventually, it's clear that she will appear in each section to anchor the overall storyline. We also learn that maybe the fantastical elements weren't all in Holly's head after all. I'm still onboard at this point. Then, we skip ahead again, to 2004, and get the point of view of Ed Brubeck -- a war reporter based in Iraq and Holly's partner. As this section alternates between a family wedding in London and Ed venturing outside the Green Zone to get "the real story" on the war, the book began to take on a more political tone, with Ed patiently trying to explain the apparent ingratitude of the Iraqi people to the wedding guests and being confronted by half-crazy and belligerent American soldiers back in Iraq. So who's to blame for the quagmire?

The de facto king of Iraq is a Kissinger acolyte named L. Paul Bremmer III. On taking office, he passed two edicts that have shaped the occupation. Edict number one ruled that any member of the Ba'ath Party above a certain rank was to be sacked. With one stroke of the pen Bremmer consigned to the scrapheap the very civil servants, scientists, teachers, police officers, engineers, and doctors that the coalition needed to rebuild the country. Fifty thousand white-collar Iraqis lost their salaries, pensions, and futures and wanted the occupation to fail from that day on. Edict number two disbanded the Iraqi Army. No back pay, no pension, no nothing. Bremmer created 375,000 potential insurgents -- unemployed, armed, and trained to kill. Hindsight is easy, sure, but if you're the viceroy of an occupied country, it's your job to possess foresight -- or at least to listen to advisers who do.

Hindsight is easy, sure, and Mitchell isn't against using it to point fingers, but okay, skip ahead four years and meet Crispin Hershey -- a middle-aged novelist who has seen better days; written his best books a long time ago (apparently based on Martin Amis?). The previously met Richard Cheeseman is now a book reviewer, and his critique both skewers Hershey and preemptively answers Mitchell's critics:

Why is Echo Must Die such a decomposing hog? One: Hershey is so bent on avoiding cliché that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistle-blower. Two: The fantasy sub-plot clashes so violently with the book's State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?

And later, Herhsey's agent remarks, in another seemingly preemptive note from Mitchell, "A book can't be half fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant." And then more fantasy elements are added (but as Soleil Moore -- apparently important to the Script -- and her actions don't really affect the overall plot, is her presence here only to set up a situation in some other, yet-to-be-written Mitchell book?). I really did like Hershey's story, so this section was encouraging. But then, skip ahead to 2025, and the fantasy elements are brought to the forefront, while never forgetting "the book's State of the World pretensions". One character, who has been more or less hibernating since 1984, asks what she has missed in the intervening 40+ years and is answered:

Oil's running out. Earth's population is eight billion, mass extinctions of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era. Apartheid's dead, as are the Castros in Cuba, as is privacy. The USSR went bankrupt; the Eastern Bloc collapsed; Germany reunified; the EU has gone federal; China's a powerhouse -- though their air is industrial effluence in a gaseous state -- and North Korea is still a gulag run by a coiffured cannibal. The Kurds have a de facto state; it's Sunni versus Shi'a throughout the Middle East; the Sri Lankan Tamils got butchered; the Palestinians still have to eke out a living off Israel's garbage dumps. People outsourced their memories to data centers and basic skills to tabs. On the eleventh of September 2001, Saudi Arabian hijackers flew two airliners into the Twin Towers. As a result Afghanistan and Iraq got invaded and occupied for years by lots of American and a few British troops. Inequality is truly Pharonic. The world's twenty-seven richest people own more wealth than the poorest five billion, and people accept that as normal. On the bright side, there's more computing power in Arkady's slate than existed in the world when you last walked it; an African American president occupied the White House for two terms; and you can now buy strawberries at Christmas.

My own description of those years might have included a few more items on the bright side, but okay, sigh, here is where we need to move on with the climax of the fantasy subplot, where the body-snatching Horologists must continue their war with the Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass (with Holly Sykes along for the ride, natch). I must confess: I see no reason for this subplot at all. I have always appreciated Mitchell's writing about the spirit and the migration of souls, but for some reason, this felt like a lame YA fantasy confrontation -- Murakami wouldn't have written this -- and, worst of all, it doesn't even matter: humanity, the Earth, the cosmos, everything proceeds along no matter which side wins. (However, redemptively, I did like that Marinus mentioned his life in Dejima and meeting the title character of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.)

Jumping ahead to 2043, Holly Sykes is now an old woman, living in a not unimaginable future world, and she shudders with grief:

It's grief for the regions we've deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office -- all so we didn't have to change our cozy lifestyles. People talk about the Endarkenment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it's an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth's Riches knowing -- while denying -- that we'd be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.

That's pretty much it -- without the plot, of course -- and I'm including all of this to say: in a lot of ways, The Bones Clocks is the same kind of story as Cloud Atlas; a warning of what the future might be like if we continue on our current path. But while I was able to close the covers of Cloud Atlas and have been moved by its vision and its novelty, to have trembled at the ultimate fate of humanity, The Bone Clocks was scolding and linear, with this useless fantasy subplot. It's like the television show Glee: remember when it first came on the air and it was entertaining and showed all of these misfits finding a safe place to gather and bond over 80s pop tunes? And then remember how it eventually became a series of very special episodes and started spelling out all the ways that we should be more tolerant of each other? I understood that message from the first episode -- I'm pretty sure we all did -- but I don't watch TV (or read books) to be scolded. (And the preemptive messages to Mitchell's would-be critics don't fix the flaws. Nice try, though.)

I'm disappointed by the overall vision here but David Mitchell is still an incredible writer, so I'll end with a curious and intriguing image: