The Bone Clocks.

I love David Mitchell’s prose, and I love his characters, but now that I’ve read all of his novels, I think I don’t really love his books as much as I should. The last one on my list was The Bone Clocks, which I tore through, as I have with every novel he’s written, but which once again left me kind of cold when it came to the story. Of his eight published novels, I think I’d say I truly liked only four, and even Cloud Atlas was probably more a respect and appreciation sort of ‘like.’

The Bone Clocks is a two-layered novel that brings back the body-snatching spirits who appear at least in passing in every one of Mitchell’s novels except for Black Swan Green. It turns out that there are two sorts, the Horologists and the Anchorites, and they’re waging a war across all of time because they differ in how they view humans – as hosts, or as food, to put it in the simplest terms. Rather than just follow these disembodied entities, however, The Bone Clocks instead follows a number of characters, notably Holly Sykes, across decades and around the world as they live their own complicated lives while often serving as unknowing vessels for Horologists. Holly is the closest thing to a central character here, as she appears at the start of the book as a rebellious teenager who finds out her boyfriend of a few weeks is actually sleeping with her best friend, which leads to a series of unfortunate events that put her on the path of the spirits, coincide with the disappearance of her younger brother (who appears to be autistic), and give her what she thinks are visions for much of the rest of her life. We also meet a group of obnoxious upper-class twits at a college that’s supposed to be like Cambridge and a bad-boy author named Crispin Hershey who’s on the downswing of his career, before eventually getting to the heart of the book, the battle for all things between the two disembodied groups, before concluding in a grim post-apocalyptic section that recalls the middle section of Cloud Atlas in setting and tone.

I just can’t get into the Horologists stuff, and Mitchell is fully invested in it, bringing them into almost every book of his, often shoehorning them in somewhere they don’t belong (Utopia Avenue). I enjoy the way he reuses characters and places, or inserts other references to his previous works into new ones, but for someone who writes such lovely, evocative prose about reality, he spends too much time in this unreal milieu. Mitchell captures much of the human experience as well as any contemporary writer, especially grief and sadness, so jerking the reader out of whatever emotions he’s created to go spend time with Marinus or Esther Little or the Mongolian or whoever does the work no favors. There’s a good novel here in The Bone Clocks that just follows Holly Sykes through her highly eventful life, but he’s written her a story that’s inextricable from the Horologists’ narrative.

Slade House is the ultimate Horologists/Anchorites novel for me – it’s a horror story and a thriller and at its heart it is just about those beings. There’s one focus there, so you’re not divided between a very real world and Mitchell’s fantasy environment. And Black Swan Green works the other way; with no mystical mumbo-jumbo, you just get a beautiful coming-of-age story, rendered in fine detail by Mitchell’s eye and pen. Even Utopia Avenue got most of the way there, as the spirits appear just once, in a brief section that you could probably skip and not miss at all. Since that’s his most recent novel, I’d like to think that it’s a sign that he’s getting away from the Horologists & Anchorites and might just continue to write straightforward novels – with lots of callbacks and other references, sure, but perhaps grounded in a single plane of existence instead.

Next up: John O’Hara’s Ten North Frederick, winner of the 1956 National Book Award for Fiction. O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra is one of my favorite novels of all time.