The Bone Clocks

Starred review from June 2, 2014
Is The Bone Clocks the most ambitious novel ever written, or just the most Mitchell-esque? We begin in the punk years with a teenage Talking Headsâobsessed runaway from Gravesend, England, named Holly Sykes. She becomes a pawn in a spiritual war between the mysterious "Radio People" and the benevolent Horologists, led by the body-shifting immortal Marinus. Many more characters and places soon find themselves worked into Marinus's "Script" across the book's six sections: there's Hugo Lamb, a cunning, amoral Cambridge student spending Christmas 1991 in Switzerland, where he encounters an older Holly tending bar; then it's the height of the Bush/Blair years, and our narrator is Holly's husband, Edmund Brubeck, a war reporter dispatched to Baghdad. Another flash-forward lands us in the present day, where the middling novelist Crispin Hershey weathers a succession of literary feuds, becomes confidante of a New Agey Holly and her daughter, then has his own unsettling encounter with the Radio People. In the penultimate section, Marinus reveals the nature of the Scriptâthe secret conflict lurking just beneath mortal affairsâand how Holly may be the key to a resolution whose repercussions won't be known until 2043, when the aged Holly rides out a curiously sedate end-time in rural Ireland. From gritty realism to far-out fantasy, each section has its own charm and surprises. With its wayward thoughts, chance meetings, and attention to detail, Mitchell's (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet) novel is a thing of beauty.

David Mitchell's sixth novel, nominated for the Booker prize, contains six sections, each connected by the character of Holly Sykes. Mitchell (CLOUD ATLAS) uses nonlinear leaps through time and reality, and listeners benefit from the spot-on performances of six talented narrators. The "Radio People" and "Horologists," denizens of an alternate world, are having a philosophical/spiritual war. A tear in Holly's psychic fabric allows her to hear them. All six actors do a remarkable job. Jessica Ball sets the tone as, in 1984, 15-year-old Holly learns harsh life lessons. Leon Williams, Colin Mace, Steven Crossley, Laurel Lefkow, and Anna Bentinck round out the impeccable cast, until the final section, in which 60-year-old Holly, now a successful author, observes from a remote corner of Ireland as the world's infrastructure crumbles. Fascinating listening. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine