The Bone Clocks

I don't know, there's no book of David Mitchell I haven't loved. They aren't perfect, some stuff really weirds me out hardcore, but they're always fascinating. The Bone Clocks fits that scheme as well.

The Bone Clocks covers a timeline of the mid-80s to the year 2043. We get a total of five different PoV characters, and every story shares that it's about the first point of view character, Holly Sykes. Holly heard 'radio voices' as a child but was cured of that by a Chinese doctor. As a teenager she runs away from home because of a tosser boyfriend, and has some kind of supernatural event occur. She eventually finds out that her precocious younger brother Jacko has disappeared.

Over the course of the other stories, we find out that Jacko never re-appeared, that Holly turns into a famous author writing about the voices in her head, and that there are two factions at war. One of them calls regular people Bone Clocks, hence the title.

The different chapters feel like vignettes, different styles, different personalities, but they all have this common red thread in them, with the supernatural events, with a generous dollop of post-apocalypse in the final chapter. I love sci-fi and fantasy, so I embraced those elements, but it's possible other readers won't.

What I probably love best about the Mitchell books is to sit down afterwards and find all easter eggs, characters and hints from previous books, and I think I found something from every work so far, even number9dream.

Another one of Mitchell. Like Cloud Atlas it makes a strong bet on how this world – or at least our world – will be / is bound to change beyond recognition. It is good that readers of a mainstream novel are reminded how lucky we are to have endless and reliable supply of things like heat, electricity, communication channels. Journalists in not-sto-lucky places don't transmit this enough when reporting how life is in war torn countries, or even not officially at war, where there is no internet and electricity is available randomly. The story itself falls in the fantasy genre, but tehre are themes of human interest that makes one put the book aside and think – the greatness of true love, teenage problems, family, tenderness, and the arrogance and privilege, revenge and sorrow. And personal sacrifice. The setback is that in too many passages there are sentences that are puzzles that will be solved only later in the plot. There are so many of them I only fully enjoyed and understood the book the second time I read it – but then it was sublime and most moving.