ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue (2020) has just been nominated for the Dublin Literary Award (and, yessss, it’s on my TBR), and by coincidence I’ve just finished reading The Bone Clocks. Which has a companion I now just have to read too, it’s called Slade House (2015)… and I’ve reserved it at the library so I’ll probably read that before I read Utopia Avenue.

Structured around several narratives, The Bone Clocks features the eternal existential battle between good and evil, and, as it should, it has an ending that leaves open the possibility that matters are not resolved. (Just like the ending of Star Wars, the original, which saw Darth Vader vanquished but not destroyed.)  Like Cloud Atlas, this novel is more, much more than the sum of its parts.

The Bone Clocks is the story of a succession of people from 1984 to 2043, all of them linked in some way to Holly Sykes, a 15-year old who storms out of the house in 1984 after a row with her mother and a double-betrayal. She’d stayed out overnight with her boyfriend, been given hell about that by her mother, and then ‘left home’ to make a new life with the boyfriend — who she finds in bed with her best friend.

On her way to what seems like a bleak future, she meets some helpful people, including a nice young man called Brendan who tells her about a fruit picking summer job he’d had during a university break.  She also meets a friendly couple who give her a bed for the night, but they get killed.

A lot of people get mysteriously killed, and one of them is probably Holly’s little brother Jason who goes missing at this time.

In 1991 the narrator is Hugo Lamb, a Hooray Henry who hangs around with other Cambridge undergraduates and beds women carelessly.  Like Holly he has inexplicable flashes of precognition and he experiences things that make no sense but it’s too soon for the reader to ‘join the dots’.  Instead we witness Hugo, untroubled by any moral scruples, constructing success from a middle-class background.  He has a contemptible strategy for enriching himself at the expense of a helpless old man, and his Swiss bank account grows in parallel with the number of friends he stitches up to lose at cards.  Just when it seems impossible to tolerate Hugo any longer, he has a crisis of conscience brought about by Holly Sykes, but this is subverted by his rescue from oblivion by agents of The Dark Side…

Suddenly it’s 2015, and Crispin Hershey is a failing writer, a one-hit wonder on the festival circuit.  (Mitchell has a lot of fun with this strand!) Crispin runs across Holly as the author of a bestseller about precognition, and is prepared to despise her, but he finds himself not doing that at all.  However, while not awful like Hugo, he is stupidly cruel.  Offended by a bad review which sunk his latest book, he sets up the reviewer for a revenge which goes further than he meant it to.  Although no one knows that he is responsible, he is plagued by guilt, and sets up a rescue campaign.  The problem is, of course, that there is one person who knows what Crispin has done.

The next section, in 2025 is where the battle between good versus evil comes into focus.  Strange events and phenomena are revealed when the Horologists (the good guys) meet to discuss Esther Little’s message from beyond the grave that they should mount a Second Mission to destroy the Anchorites (the bad guys).  The First Mission, five years ago, failed disastrously, leaving the Anchorites to continue with their dastardly methods of achieving immortality.  The Horologists, led by Marinus (who we’ve met before in different incarnations), need the cooperation of Holly — and she has had to put up with so many fraudsters since the publication of her book The Radio People, that she refuses to believe a thing that Marinus says.

The last section reminded me of the devastating landscape in Lucy Treloar’s Wolfe Island, (see my review).  It reveals in all its misery the compromised existence of life in a future world where climate change has conspired with political failure to destroy the world as we know it. Holly and her adopted family live in a part of an unrecognisable Ireland, governed by the Orwellian Stability regime. Holly has learned to ‘make and make do’ in a situation where they are sustained by ever-decreasing rations and what they can grow or catch for themselves.  All our easy ways of communication using phones and the internet are gone because the concept of governing for the public good and shared resources has gone.  As in most dystopias, there are frightening armed gangs preying on the vulnerable… and very little hope.

There are numerous very fine reviews that deconstruct this novel making links with Mitchell’s other fiction and his thematic concerns and influences.  These include James Wood’s at the New Yorker, and Julian Nowitz’s at The Sydney Review of Books and they are both examples of why professional criticism matters (and booklovers would do well to support it).  But for me, this was a grand story, from a master storyteller, and I loved it.

Author: David Mitchell
Title: The Bone Clocks
Publisher: Sceptre (Hodder & Stoughton), 2014
ISBN: 9780340921616, pbk., 595 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Kidna Books Hampton, $29.99