Thanks to your Script, Horology is finished.” I see.Īs quickly as this barrage of nonsense arrives, however, it is gone, and we are back to a genuinely moving portrait of a young girl’s life. Consider this, from the fight in which Holly, fifteen year-old refugee, finds herself an unwitting target: “Did you think the Shaded Way has never heard of burglar alarms? Did you not know that the Chapel is the Cathar and the Cathar is the Chapel? Holokai’s soul is ash. Which, all right-but that does not mean the author should fill his pages with nonsense only to explain it all implausibly 500 pages later. If it appears meaningless, that is because it is also meaningless to Holly. All of the novel’s six sections are written in the first person, but with different narrators, so the reader is only privy to information that the narrator herself can understand. Mitchell’s prose is often so deft and appropriate that one has to wonder why he would spoil it with garbled, rambling accusations, unfamiliar names, and capitalized words. Following an argument with her mother, she runs away from home and right into a battle that makes approximately zero sense to the reader. Holly Sykes, a sort of main character who narrates the first section, is headstrong, honest, and utterly likeable. Maybe three-quarters of this sizeable text is well written and captivating. Whereas The Silmarillion is a self-consistent bible that embraces the influences of Nordic, Finnish, and Greek mythologies, the universe of Mitchell’s sprawling novel, with its spell-casting, body-hopping immortals (sorry, “Atemporals”), and “psychosoterica,” is dotted with inconsistencies and violations of the pact that allows the reader to suspend her disbelief. This is the primary issue with The Bone Clocks, the newest novel by David Mitchell, author of the massively successful Cloud Atlas. Ornate systems of mythical histories and commandments tend to lack the meat and movement of successful fiction-that is why people read The Silmarillion or Quidditch Through the Ages after having read The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series, not the other way around. Without the drama of the human experience, the reader is left holding pages of rules and regulations that are roughly as interesting as a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook (which can be quite interesting, but only if the reader is planning to actually play the game). A reader will only buy a certain amount of clumsy explanation before she needs something in return, something else to compel her attention, something like a plot or a convincing relationship. From the Hardcover edition.There is, I think, a transactional element inherent in fiction. Rich with character and realms of possibility, The Bone Clocks is a kaleidoscopic novel that begs to be taken apart and put back together. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder. A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list-all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly's life, affecting all the people Holly loves-even the ones who are not yet born. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics-and their enemies. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as 'the radio people,' Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. His hypnotic new novel, The Bone Clocks, crackles with invention and wit-it is fiction at its most spellbinding and memorable. David Mitchell is an eloquent conjurer of interconnected tales, a genre-bending daredevil, and a master prose stylist.