The Bone Clocks

The first thing to know about The Bone Clocks is that it is not one book. It is six books stacked on top of each other, with a teenage girl at the bottom and an old woman at the top. David Mitchell published it in 2014, and it moves from a very ordinary English summer in 1984 to a ruined Ireland in 2043. In between there is a Cambridge con artist, a war correspondent, a bitter novelist, and a hidden war between two kinds of immortals. The miracle is that it holds together.

The girl is Holly Sykes. When we meet her she is fifteen, living in Gravesend, and running away from home after finding her boyfriend Vinny with her best friend Stella. Holly is stubborn, mouthy, and more vulnerable than she lets on. Before she leaves, her little brother Jacko gives her a paper maze and makes her promise to memorize it. Jacko is seven or eight, odd and sweet, and he says things that do not quite fit a child. That maze matters later. So does Jacko.

A Hot Spell, 1984

Holly's runaway day turns strange fast. She meets an old woman named Esther Little, who offers her green tea and asks for asylum. Holly thinks Esther is a harmless eccentric, maybe a little mad. Then she hitches a ride with a couple named Heidi and Ian, wakes up to find them dead, and is attacked by a man called Rhîmes. The dead couple's bodies move. Esther has been using them as a disguise. Esther enters Holly's mind, hides there, and erases Holly's memory of the attack.

Holly makes it to a strawberry farm in Kent, where she meets another runaway named Gwyn and starts to build a temporary life. Then Ed Brubeck arrives. Ed is a young man who fed her earlier and told her about the farm. He brings news that Jacko is missing, and the police think Holly may have taken him. Holly goes home. Jacko is not there. He never really comes back.

That opening section is one of the best things Mitchell has written. It works as a realist story about a girl running away from a bad family night, and it works as a horror story about something ancient moving under the surface. The supernatural elements do not announce themselves. They arrive as a dead couple, a woman with green tea, and a child who knows too much.

Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, 1991

The second section jumps to Hugo Lamb, a Cambridge student with no conscience worth mentioning. Hugo cheats on essays, steals from friends, runs scams, and treats other people as furniture. He is charming in the way a con man is charming, which is to say he is excellent company until you realize he is calculating the cost of everything you say.

Hugo's life gets complicated by gambling debts, a theft, and the death of a friend named Jonny Penhaligon. He is also being watched by Immaculée Constantin, a woman who hints that there is a way to live forever. Hugo is interested. He is the kind of person who would be interested.

On a holiday in Switzerland, Hugo meets Holly, who is now working as a bar manager. They talk about Jacko, who is still missing. They sleep together on a chaotic New Year's Eve. There is a real connection between them, or at least a real moment of honesty. Then two men named Elijah D'Arnoq and Baptiste Pfenninger reveal themselves as Anchorites and offer Hugo a place among them. Hugo's legal and social troubles are closing in. He looks at the future with Holly, decides it is not enough, and accepts.

This is the section where the novel's cosmology starts to show its shape. The Anchorites are not vampires. They are people who have found a way to extend their lives by consuming the psychic energy of gifted children. Their immortality is built on murder. Hugo, who has spent his life taking from others, fits right in.

The Wedding Bash, 2004

The third section belongs to Ed Brubeck, now a war correspondent and Holly's partner. They have a six-year-old daughter named Aoife. Ed is supposed to be settling into family life. He is secretly planning to go back to Baghdad. He is haunted by the deaths of his Iraqi guides, Aziz and Nassar, who were killed in a bombing meant for foreign journalists.

The family is in Brighton for Holly's younger sister's wedding. Aoife disappears on the pier after encountering Immaculée. Holly goes into a trance and repeats the words "ten" and "fifteen." A fortune-teller named Dwight Silverwind helps Ed work out that the numbers point to hotel room 1015. Ed finds Aoife there. He tells the family a version of the story that leaves out the supernatural. Later he tells Holly the truth.

The section works because it takes the weirdness seriously without losing the domestic texture. Ed is a man who has seen violence in Iraq and still cannot explain what happened on a pier in England. His love for Aoife is the engine of the rescue, and the psychic clue is just the map. Mitchell is good at this kind of thing: he lets the supernatural intrude on a family crisis and then makes the family crisis the part that matters.

Crispin Hershey's Lonely Planet, 2015 to 2020

The fourth section is a satire of literary life. Crispin Hershey is a novelist whose career is sliding. His marriage is over. His books no longer sell the way they used to. Holly, meanwhile, has published a memoir called The Radio People, and it is a success that eclipses him. Crispin is jealous, needy, and funny in a way that makes you wince.

His feud with a critic named Richard Cheeseman becomes the center of the section. Cheeseman wrote a hostile review, and Crispin retaliates by planting cocaine in his luggage. The plan goes further than Crispin intended. Cheeseman is sentenced to six years, and Crispin has to live with what he did.

Crispin becomes close to Holly, and through her he sees things that make her psychic claims hard to dismiss. She speaks in tongues during a seizure. She predicts ten coin tosses in a row. She keeps associating him with a spider, a spiral, and a one-eyed man. Crispin does not know what to do with any of it, so he turns it into material.

In Iceland, the now-immortal Hugo attacks and interrogates him, then erases his memory. Crispin learns that Holly has terminal cancer and that a doctor named Iris Fenby is offering an experimental treatment. By 2020 Crispin is broke and teaching at a college in New York. Cheeseman, out of prison and wearing an eye patch, confronts him and lets him go. Then Soleil Moore, a young poet Crispin ignored, arrives and shoots him. As he dies, he sees the spiral, the spider, and the one-eyed toy pirate. Holly's images were not random. They were a warning, or a map, or both.

The Crispin section divides readers. Some find it a brilliant, nasty comedy of literary manners. Others find it long and self-indulgent, a detour away from Holly. I land somewhere in the middle. It is the funniest part of the book, and it is also the part where the plot waits the longest for the next turn.

An Horologist's Labyrinth, 2025

The fifth section is the big reveal, and it belongs to Marinus, a Horologist who is currently inhabiting the body of Dr. Iris Fenby. Marinus receives psychic messages from Esther Little and discovers that Esther has been hidden inside Holly's memories since 1984. The section explains the war.

Horologists reincarnate naturally. They die and come back in new bodies without harming anyone. Anchorites prolong their lives by murdering psychically gifted children and making Black Wine. The Blind Cathar is the metaphysical source of their power. The two groups have been fighting for centuries, and Holly has been caught in the middle since she was a teenager.

Holly learns that Jacko was Xi Lo, a Horologist who died during a failed mission in 1984. The little brother she lost was not a little brother at all, or not only that. He was an immortal who loved her enough to give her a maze. Holly, who is dying of cancer, agrees to help the Horologists.

Marinus uses Esther's long name to extract her from Holly's mind. The Horologists attack the Chapel of the Blind Cathar. There is a battle, and it is full of the kind of jargon that Mitchell enjoys: psychosoteric combat, black wine, golden apples. Esther destroys the Blind Cathar. Marinus's body is lost, but her consciousness continues through Holly. Holly reaches the center of the maze Jacko gave her and confronts Immaculée. Marinus distracts her, and Holly knocks her out with a rolling pin. A golden apple opens a route to safety. Marinus leaves Holly's mind and stays behind with Hugo, who admits that he truly loved Holly. The chapel collapses. Hugo's fate is left unclear.

The rolling pin is the best detail in the book. After hundreds of pages of immortal warfare and cosmic stakes, the decisive blow comes from a kitchen utensil. Mitchell knows that the sublime and the ridiculous are neighbors.

Sheep's Head, 2043

The final section is quiet, and it is the one I think about most. Holly is an old woman living on Sheep's Head in rural Ireland. Five years earlier, the Endarkenment began: climate change, resource depletion, and infrastructure failure have broken the world. Holly cares for her teenage granddaughter Lorelei, whose parents died in a plane crash, and for Rafiq, a diabetic refugee boy from Morocco. Ireland has been relatively stable because of an agreement with China involving land, oil, and restricted internet access. Now China is withdrawing its support.

Government remnants and militias fight over fuel and solar equipment. The violence creates openings for local communities to organize and survive. An Icelandic vessel arrives to repatriate Lorelei because her father was Icelandic. One of the crew members is a reincarnation of Marinus, though the powers are diminished. Holly persuades Marinus to help Rafiq too. The ship takes Lorelei and Rafiq. Holly stays in Ireland. She knows she will probably die there. She chooses to protect the younger generation instead of chasing her own survival.

That ending could be sentimental, but Mitchell keeps it hard. Holly does not give a speech about hope. She makes a practical decision, lets the children go, and stays with the house and the garden and the failing world. The novel's title comes from the immortals' slang for ordinary people, whose bodies are bone clocks ticking down. Holly is a bone clock. So is everyone she loves. The book's final argument is that this is not a reason to stop caring.

What the book is doing

The Bone Clocks is about mortality, but it is also about form. Each section is a different genre: YA runaway story, campus con-artist novel, war journalism, literary satire, occult thriller, climate dystopia. Mitchell is showing off, and he knows it. The pleasure of the book is watching him switch voices and still keep Holly at the center. She is the one who connects the sections, even when she is offstage. Her life is the clock the title refers to.

The weakness is that the cosmology can feel like a machine built to explain the plot rather than a belief system that earns its place. The Horologists and Anchorites are compelling in their basic contrast, natural reincarnation versus predatory immortality, but the vocabulary can get thick. Readers who want a single continuous story may find the Crispin section and the Marinus exposition slow. The ending leaves several immortal fates unresolved, which is deliberate but not entirely satisfying.

Still, the book has a big heart. It cares about memory, about the stories we tell to survive, and about the difference between taking from the world and leaving something for the people who come after you. Holly is not a chosen one in the usual sense. She is a girl who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then a woman who kept choosing to stay. By the end, that is enough.

I would recommend it to readers who like ambitious, genre-mixing fiction and do not mind being patient. It is not a fast book, despite the switches. It is a book that rewards attention, especially to the small objects: a maze, a photograph, a rolling pin, a golden apple. Those objects carry more meaning than the speeches about the Blind Cathar. They are the things people leave behind.