jethrien

Title: The Bone Clocks
Author: David Mitchell
Genre: Modern day fantasy disguised as literary
Thingummies: 5

Synopsis: Two bands of immortals duel across centuries; meanwhile, ordinary people live lives of loss, regret, and beauty.

Thoughts: This book has been getting mixed reviews, and I think it's because of a fundamental misapprehension. Mitchell's previous work were fairly literary, so this has been marketed as literary fiction. It's got the in-depth characterization and the attention to minutiae that literary fiction usually focuses on. It's got some beautifully crafted prose. It feels literary.

It's not. This is fantasy.

But it's a literary approach to fantasy, and so the ending is literary. Not exactly happy, not exactly neat, and much of the world-building unresolved. Satisfying and a bit sad, but not what most people expect from the resolution of an epic fantasy battle.

I loved it. But then, I like both genres at their best.

It's a bit similar in structure to Cloud Atlas, as we bounce through the heads of several different protagonists, each wildly different in character, each with their own plotline that at first seems barely connected to the others. And from a plot perspective, they are unconnected. The plot is the story of the Horologists, who are eternally reborn in new bodies, and the Anchorites, who steal other's life forces to gain immortality. Each character brushes up against the battle at some point, usually to their detriment. But it's not what each one's tale is actually about. They get entangled, but the real story of each one's life is separate. Some of them are fairly detestable, but by the end of each one's section, I had a certain sympathy. They're human.

There are flaws here. Hugo Lamb is practically the same character as Robert Frobisher from Cloud Atlas. Crispin Hershey is stalked by a woman who's never fully explained. I'm not sure I agree with Mitchell's conviction that we're inevitably doomed to return to the Stone Age, which he seems to carry from book to book.

But I loved it anyway. When I finally understood the title, and what it implied about the importance of everyday people, I found it lovely. Mitchell is a pessimist about the fate of the human race, but an optimist about the fate of the human soul.