Thursday, February 12, 2015

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell


The Bone Clocks

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THE BONE CLOCKS by David Mitchell
Sceptre 2014
I received this book today as purchased from Amazon UK.
My real-time notes on this book in comment stream below…
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7 responses to “The Bone Clocks”

  2. nullimmortalis

    January 31, 2015 at 3:52 pm Edit

    “S’pose Heaven’s not like a painting that’s just hanging there … Like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you’re alive, from passing cars, or … upstairs windows when you’re lost…”
    This is not a real-time review proper, but I shall report that I am up to page 90 in the hardback, and young Holly’s first person narrative journey – after running away from home in 1984 around Gravesend, Kent, a journey peppered with involuntary periods of Todash – has so far been all-consuming. Including her amusing recall of her Dad’s philosophies of life spoken to the grizzled customers in his pub…
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  3. nullimmortalis

    February 2, 2015 at 7:36 pm Edit

    I’ve now read up to page 195 as told by Hugo Lamb the Poshboy conman…literary yet free flowing prose that really appeals to me, Roth, M Amis, you name it. With open Todash shoes. One of the best snowed in scenes in literature when he woos our Holly. I wonder if I am a ‘psychosoterica’ because it seems to me that you need to be one in order to do these real-time reviews as dreamcatchers at all.
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  4. nullimmortalis

    February 6, 2015 at 8:17 pm Edit

    I’ve now read up to page 278, covering the 2004 Wedding Bash, a plait of events at a Wedding reception in UK and events in Iraq during the aftermath of the WMD War. Highly readable and compulsive. Fortune telling, Holly’s child going missing, bombs and metaphorical bombshells, and the theory and practice of Journalism.
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  5. nullimmortalis

    February 12, 2015 at 7:35 pm Edit

    I’ve now read up to page 383, covering 2015 – 2020 (effectively the SF part of this novel now starting), telling of Crispin Hershey, an author possibly similar to Martin Amis, and a compulsive view of the literary world and Colombian prisons where Crispin abandons someone who wrote a bad review of his novel!
    Brittan seems to be similar to Alan Sugar?
    All tying in with Holly’s SCRIPT, which reminds me preternaturally of my own Dreamcatcher book reviews. She is ill now, possibly like me, full diagnosis awaited.
    “A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synaesthesia and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul and, yes, to a degree , your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardise your relationships and distend your life.”
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  6. nullimmortalis

    February 19, 2015 at 2:42 pm Edit

    I have now finished reading the 2025 section ending on page 520. This gets a bit wearing, a sort of explain-all as to why things have happened, a reincarnatory slipstream of souls and bodies with many neologisms, e.g. involving the prefixes psycho- and sub-. But most of it is sheer theosophistry. This book is currently in tournamental combat with Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X (Annihilation from the Southern Reach Trilogy). My earlier review of Area X here.
    If the crux of the combat is just with this Psychosoterica section of The Bone Clocks, then VanderMeer wins hands down.
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  7. nullimmortalis

    February 20, 2015 at 3:07 pm Edit

    “…my feckless generation trusted our memories to the Net, so the ’39 crash was like a collective stroke.”
    I have now finished my subreview of the 2043 section and, thus, of the whole book itself. This last section seems like a musical psychocoda by means of a post-holocaust, where orientalist trade embargoes have become cruelly transgressable cordons and Hinkley’s Point lethally sharpened, as Holly lives on as grandmother, now in her familial Eire become a pre- and post-palimpsest.
    There are compelling sections of this book that make it worth reading, but sadly not the last two sections. I feel it has all been a bit multi-subbed. Time now for my own version of a Colombian gaol.
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