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The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

Book list *Starred Review* Reviewing Hari Kunzru's Gods without Men in the March 8, 2012, New York Times, Douglas Coupland coined the term translit to describe a new kind of novel that collapses time and space as it seeks to generate narrative traction in the reader's mind. The term itself has been gaining plenty of traction, too, as more and more writers adapt genre-bending strategies to a highly complex but entrancing form of literary fiction. Besides Kunzru, Haruki Murakami clearly falls into this category (especially his 1Q84, 2011), as does Nick Harkaway (in Angelmaker, 2012), but David Mitchell also deserves a seat at the head of the translit table, and his new book, The Bone Clocks, just may become the quintessential example of translit fiction, not only in its complexity and thematic richness, but also in the remarkable narrative propulsion that drives its many-cylindered engine. The book opens in the grand tradition of coming-of-age novels distinguished by their hypnotic, first-person narrators, but while the voice of British teenager Holly Sykes can hold its own with those of Holden Caulfield or John Green's Hazel Grace Lancaster, it is merely the opening salvo in this multivoiced, harmonically layered narrative symphony that stretches with occasional sojourns far back in time from the 1980s, when Holly runs away from home, into the 2040s, when she is attempting to cope with an oil-depleted world descending into chaos. But plot summaries are a far too simplistic device for talking about this novel. It is neither coming-of-age story nor dystopian fiction; nor is it fantasy, contemporary satire, or high-concept adventure thriller, though it surely has elements of all of those and more. That's the thing with translit: it shows us how feeble our pigeonholing genre categories can be when applied to a novel that sets out to break boundaries on multiple levels. Those boundaries begin to shatter when the young Holly hears what she calls the radio people, voices from another dimension. Gradually, Mitchell introduces us to an epic conflict being staged beyond the world of mundane life, a Harry Potter-like duel to the death between two groups able to traverse time: the Atemporals, also called Horologists, who are born with the capacity for living again after one self dies (they may die permanently, however, if they are killed before experiencing a natural death), and the Anchorites, who also have the psychic power to regenerate themselves but only if they feed (like vampires) off the souls of other psychically endowed mortals (like Holly). The Atemporals, led by a character called Marinus, a veteran of multiple lives over centuries, are trying both to save Holly from the Anchorites and to use her to help them deliver the coup de grâce that will wipe out the soul-decanting Anchorites forever. That sounds a little too cartoony, perhaps, but it doesn't read that way. Mitchell builds his characters as carefully as he does his worlds, and by the time the final battle takes place, we are thoroughly invested in the story and the people. By that time, too, we have followed those characters and many others through six time-jumping sections, each a smaller-scale tour de force of its own. Especially engaging is a section set essentially in the present and featuring a once-successful novelist watching his career slip away through a succession of writers' conferences that vividly capture the bane of creeping mediocrity. Remarkably, all of these disparate sections connect perfectly, not just as plot elements, but as aspects of a greater thematic whole. The novel is a meditation on mortality, of course, but also on the hazards of immortality and the perils of power. It is our failing novelist, though, who gives us the perfect metaphor for understanding the thematic reach of Mitchell's masterpiece. Rambling on about Icelandic literature at a conference in Reykjavík, he notes that writers are fascinated with the edges of maps. Those edges are at the heart of translit, and the The Bone Clocks delivers a finely detailed cartography of their every variation. This novel will be one of the most talked-about books of the year, as well it should be; it's a triumph on every one of its many levels.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2014 Booklist

Library Journal In his breathtaking, audacious, stampedingly beautiful latest, Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) uses the battle between evil soul decanters and good Horologists, who are masterminded by the wise, powerful, body-shifting Marinus, to tell a much larger story. It's a story that embraces the life of Holly Sykes, from a bad boyfriend moment in the Talking Heads era, discovering that her brother has gone missing, running from home, witnessing the first bloody clash between good and evil when people who take her in are murdered, then recognizing her psychic powers and continuing the run to a snowbound resort in the Alps. There, she encounters sly Hugo, an amoral lout aspiring to the upper crust who redeems himself somewhat by discovering that he loves her. Holly goes on to marry war reporter Ed, who refuses to acknowledge Holly's connection to the beyond; wins fame writing a book about her experiences, leading to some wonderfully rendered satire about the writer's world; and finally plays her part in the final battle between the ethereal forces that have been tracking her all along. (Then the narrative moves to war and ecological crash in the 2040s; bad stuff never stops.) This really isn't a book about Holly, though, but about the variety of fantastically rendered worlds we move through as her story unfolds-which is to say our world, past, present, and looming future, brought to us through a fantasy underpinning that juices up the narrative but isn't its heart. Mitchell's not doing genre but asking us ever-ticking bone clocks to stop being so comfortable with how we measure ourselves and our world: "Beware of asking people to question what's real and what isn't. They may reach conclusions you didn't see coming." Verdict Quite a lot of book and not for easy-reading fans, but it's brilliant. [See Prepub Alert, 5/19/14.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Is The Bone Clocks the most ambitious novel ever written, or just the most Mitchell-esque? We begin in the punk years with a teenage Talking Heads-obsessed runaway from Gravesend, England, named Holly Sykes. She becomes a pawn in a spiritual war between the mysterious "Radio People" and the benevolent Horologists, led by the body-shifting immortal Marinus. Many more characters and places soon find themselves worked into Marinus's "Script" across the book's six sections: there's Hugo Lamb, a cunning, amoral Cambridge student spending Christmas 1991 in Switzerland, where he encounters an older Holly tending bar; then it's the height of the Bush/Blair years, and our narrator is Holly's husband, Edmund Brubeck, a war reporter dispatched to Baghdad. Another flash-forward lands us in the present day, where the middling novelist Crispin Hershey weathers a succession of literary feuds, becomes confidante of a New Agey Holly and her daughter, then has his own unsettling encounter with the Radio People. In the penultimate section, Marinus reveals the nature of the Script-the secret conflict lurking just beneath mortal affairs-and how Holly may be the key to a resolution whose repercussions won't be known until 2043, when the aged Holly rides out a curiously sedate end-time in rural Ireland. From gritty realism to far-out fantasy, each section has its own charm and surprises. With its wayward thoughts, chance meetings, and attention to detail, Mitchell's (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet) novel is a thing of beauty. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Library Journal Using a variation of the storytelling structure he employed in Cloud Atlas, Mitchell weaves six interrelated first-person narratives into an epic tale that "follows" the character Holly Sykes from 1984 to 2043. Mitchell presents the reader with everyday human experiences that carry the hint-and sometimes more than a hint-of something supernatural affecting the lives of people ("bone clocks") on Earth. Clever, engaging, and often fun (readers of earlier Mitchell works should look for familiar characters), this novel is slightly flawed but eventually successful. The flaw is in the fifth narrative, in which listeners learn about those supernatural beings, immortals ("atemporals") who are waging an epic battle between good and evil; the storytelling here becomes slightly tedious but finds its footing again in the sixth and final narrative. VERDICT Although this type of story structure can be difficult to follow in audio form, the use of six readers-Jessica Ball, Leon Williams, Colin Mace, Steven Crossley, Laurel Lefkow, and Anna Bentinck-helps listeners find their way through this sweeping and ultimately extremely satisfying tale. ["Quite a lot of book and not for easy-reading fans, but it's brilliant," read the starred review of the Random hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 10/10/14; an LJ Top Ten Best Book of 2014.]-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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