This is a lot to accept, and Mitchell’s specialized vocabulary – Atemporals silently “subspeak” to each other, manipulating mere mortals through “suasion” – doesn’t help, especially when he jumps ahead and from narrator to narrator.

Specifically “psychovoltaic” souls like Holly’s (remember that weird shit?). (These characters help Mitchell explain some of his recurring characters, like Marinus from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, 2010, who float from book to book.) Less welcome are the Anchorites, or “Carnivores,” who achieve their immortality by “decanting” human souls. These are the Horologists, benign souls whose destiny is to be perpetually reincarnated unless they are “killed-killed” by particular violence. Along the way, Holly gets involved in an ongoing battle between two kinds of Atemporals, supernatural creatures who are beyond time. What that is, as most readers will know by now, reaches far beyond Holly’s teenage romantic woes and into a dystopian future that serves as an ecological cautionary tale. It’s only a few pages later, when Holly starts talking about “Holly Sykes and the Weird Shit” that we get a peek at just what Mitchell has in store for us. He gives her a maze he’s drawn and says something about “the Dusk” that won’t make sense for several hundred pages. And as Holly heads out, her encounter with her strange little brother is easy to pass over.

When Mitchell’s latest opens, with the 15-year-old Holly Sykes reminiscing about a romantic interlude with her significantly older boyfriend, it’s electric, the tone so dead-on right that it’s hard to remember the author’s gender. Hell, I loved Cloud Atlas, Mitchell’s breakthrough third novel (2004), which jumped centuries as well as voices, nestling strikingly different historical and speculative novellas inside one another in bewitching fashion.ĭon’t get me wrong. A crime fiction writer myself, I’m no snob when it comes to fantasy-realism mash-ups, to a dash of science fiction invading straight contemporary narrative. From the early reviews – and David Mitchell’s earlier books – I was prepared for the return of the author’s herky-jerky stylings, his shifts in voice and POV, in tone and literary genre. While The Bone Clocks is compulsively readable, there are too many parts of this book that can only be called lazy.

The bone clocks review