For whatever reason, I've always felt slightly resistant to reading David Mitchell's novels. I have in fact read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I saw described recently in an article in the Telegraph as 'a less instantaneously charming book' than Mitchell's earlier work. I've also seen the film of Cloud Atlas, which I watched twice in a row because I didn't fully understand what was going on. Perhaps it's been something to do with the labelling of them as sci-fi, not my favourite genre? But The Bone Clocks has convinced me that I need to read more.
Of course this is not really sci-fi at all. Certainly out-of-worldly things do happen, but not in the weird and normally depressing mode of novels set in some imagined future (though admittedly we do get a bit of that at the end). No, this novel tells the wonderfully involving story of Holly Sykes, who we meet at various stages over a sixty year period. Sometimes Holly is centre stage, and at other times she is tangential to the events that are being narrated by people who have collided with her life in one way or another. Some episodes appear to be more or less realistic, in the sense that they describe events that you and I can recognise as wholly probable. At other times we are in a sort of parallel universe in which an eternal conflict is raging between the Horologists and the Anchorites, ageless immortals who are capable of eternally reproducing themselves by taking over human bodies. The two universes are connected, naturally, and Holly Sykes proves to be the innocent key to the culmination of a massive struggle between what I suppose we can only call the forces of good and evil.
This is certainly a fascinating concept, which seems to collide but not to be identical with reincarnation. But that's really by the by. I'm still puzzling over what, really, this book is actually about. Is it in fact about anything other than human beings' lives, which have a limited time-span, and the juxtaposition of these with a timeless, or apparently timeless, reality? I honestly don't know. I was totally engaged with Holly, and loved it when we re-met her each time, after gaps of sometimes decades, as a rebellious teenager, a canny waitress in a ski resort, a mother of a beloved daughter, a successful writer of a book about her own psychic experiences, and finally as a dying grandmother in a cottage in a remote part of Ireland. I loved all the people her life engaged with at different times, all flawed but somehow forgivable. I remembered one of the Horologists, Dr Marinus, from Jacob Zoet and because I know many of the other characters have also appeared elsewhere (and because I enjoyed this, despite my slight puzzlement), I feel impelled to read more of David Mitchell. More than that I cannot say, and I feel a bit useless as a result.
