The Bone Clocks (David Mitchell)
27 May 2015
One drowsy summer's day in 1984, teenage runaway Holly Sykes encounters a strange woman who offers a small kindness in exchange for 'asylum'. Decades will pass before Holly understands exactly what sort of asylum the woman was seeking...
The Bone Clocks follows the twists and turns of Holly's life from a scarred adolescence in Gravesend to old age on Ireland's Atlantic coast as Europe's oil supply dries up - a life not so far out of the ordinary, yet punctuated by flashes of precognition, visits from people who emerge from thin air and brief lapses in the laws of reality. For Holly Sykes - daughter, sister, mother, guardian - is also an unwitting player in a murderous feud played out in the shadows and margins of our world, and may prove to be its decisive weapon.
Average Rating:
Sinclair Manson (23 June 2015 12:59)
I enjoyed this a lot. It's written in an impressive and convincing variety of voices, some of the narrators being quite unexpected. The core plot runs quietly alongside a large part of the book but in a way that heightens the mystery, rather than frustrates. The contrast between the two groups of immortals seems key. The involuntary horologists live full but random human lives. It could be argued that the carnivores have stopped the progress of their lives, so they are not living forever, they have in fact ceased to live. They view humanity as prey and so care nothing for the world, while the horologists are forced to face the axiom that a just society is one into any part of which one would happily be born.