Like
The Cloud Atlas, the underlying theme of David Mitchell’s
The Bone Clocks is predaciousness — between classes, genders, nations, humanity and the environment, and ultimately good and evil. Holly Sykes, the daughter of a small town English pub owner, is a connector between these characters. However, Mitchell fans will recognize deeper connections: Hugo Lamb comes from Mitchell’s semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green, and Marinus, the doctor who treats Sykes’ “voices,” was a physician three centuries earlier in Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Which brings us to the novel’s metaphysical facet: a battle between two near-immortal factions of atemporals, one that drinks the “wine” of dead children, the other that consciously reincarnates. If we are reading this correctly, this conflict may eventually bind all Mitchell’s work into one incredibly ambitious meta-novel. But, for now,
The Bone Clocks stands on its own merits and, while we don’t take as much pleasure delving into the world of 1984 as we do 1849 or 2346, there is no doubt Mitchell is a singular storyteller at the peak of his craft.
— Silke Tudor
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