#The bone clockx series

Rowling's 'The Silkworm,' (written as Robert Galbraith), where a real writer uses fictional characters to comment on the state of publishing, it's highly entertaining listening to the acidic Hershey's take on everything from literary festivals pullulating with punters, “securely pensioned metropolitans stuffed with artisanal fudge and organic cider” to adverbs: “Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. He and Holly meet at a literary festival, where she’s become an unlikely bestseller after writing “The Radio People,” in an effort to reach out to her brother, if he’s still living. Hershey exacts a particularly nasty revenge on a critic who publishes a scathing review of his would-be comeback novel. The fourth, the book’s funniest section, is a biting literary send-up starring Crispin Hershey, a former wild child of British letters whose career is circling the drain. The third section, which has echoes of Graham Greene, is narrated by Ed Brubeck, a high-school classmate of Holly’s who has grown into a foreign correspondent haunted by his reporting of the Iraq war. The second section jumps to Switzerland in the early 1990s and is narrated by Hugo Lamb, a social climber who’s decided morals are for suckers. (Just don’t call them vampires.)Īs if being serial-killing soul-drinkers weren’t bad enough, they are also racists. One of them had targeted Holly and was grooming her for “decanting” before a Horologist rendered her unappetizing by getting rid of those pesky voices in her head. Instead, her little brother disappears, leaving Holly and her family reeling. Like the True Knot in Stephen King’s “Doctor Sleep,” the Anchorites acquire perpetual youth and immortality by imbibing the souls of children and teenagers with special psychic abilities. There are the Horologists, benevolent guardians who reincarnate in new bodies after death and the – hang on a sec – “Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass.” (“Too long for business cards,” one of the Horologists sniffs.) Thanks to her abilities, Holly has attracted the attention of two groups of immortals. What underlies US inertia on mass shootings? It may be lack of trust.

“The Radio People, I called them, ’cause at first I thought there was a radio on in the next room,” she says.Despite its precise grounding in Margaret Thatcher's England, “The Bone Clocks” is a world, where, as the novel’s most cynical character puts it, “Portals appear in thin air. After discovering – in a particularly painful fashion – that it might not be true love after all, she decides to hit the road for a few days anyway, to teach her parents (especially her mum) a lesson.īut in the background, something extra is percolating. “The Bone Clocks” opens in 1984, when Holly has decided to run away from home to live with her older boyfriend. With that one asterisk, Mitchell pulls them all off with aplomb and ample showmanship, tossing off one beautiful line after another. Holly narrates the first and last section, three men in her life get the middle three, and then there’s the next-to the last section, which is the book’s most problematic.

It also racks up some serious frequent-flier miles, starting in England and visiting Switzerland, Iceland, Iraq, Argentina, and Western Australia before touching down in New York for the big epic fantasy showdown (more on that later) and winding up in Ireland.Īlong the way, Mitchell divides up the novel by narrator and genre, including literary farce, fantasy, and post-apocalyptic.

#The bone clockx series

Like his earlier “Cloud Atlas,” which was a finalist for the Booker Prize, “The Bone Clocks,” is a series of six interlinking novellas. “A book can't be half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half-pregnant,” a literary agent tells a writer in David Mitchell’s staggeringly ambitious, genre-bending new novel, The Bone Clocks. Over the course of 600-plus pages, Mitchell comes very close to proving her wrong. “The Bone Clocks,” which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, chews through the years and the miles, spanning 1984 to 2043, as it follows the life of Holly Sykes, one of Mitchell’s most appealing characters yet, from 15-year-old runaway to grandmother.