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Summary
Summary
he New York Times bestseller by the author of Cloud Atlas ¿ Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize ¿ Named One of the Top Ten Fiction Books of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, and O: The Oprah Magazine ¿ A New York Times Notable Book ¿ An American Library Association Notable Book ¿ Winner of the World Fantasy Award ¿With The Bone Clocks, [David] Mitchell rises to meet and match the legacy of Cloud Atlas.¿¿Los Angeles Times Following a terrible fight with her mother over her boyfriend, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her family and her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as ¿the radio people,¿ Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life. For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics¿and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly¿s life, affecting all the people Holly loves¿even the ones who are not yet born. A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting on the war in Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list¿all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder. Rich with character and realms of possibility, The Bone Clocks is a kaleidoscopic novel that begs to be taken apart and put back together by a writer The Washington Post calls ¿the novelist who¿s been showing us the future of fiction.¿ An elegant conjurer of interconnected tales, a genre-bending daredevil, and a master prose stylist, David Mitchell has become one of the leading literary voices of his generation. His hypnotic new novel, The Bone Clocks, crackles with invention and wit and sheer storytelling pleasure¿it is fiction at its most spellbinding.
Author Notes
David Mitchell was born in Merseyside, England on January 12, 1969. He received a degree in English and American literature and an M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Kent. Before becoming a full-time writer, he taught English to technical students in Japan. His first novel, Ghostwritten, was published in 1999 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Two of his novels, Number9dream and Cloud Atlas, were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2012, Cloud Atlas was made into a major motion picture film starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. His other works include Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Bone Clocks, and Slade House. He and his wife translated into English a book written by an autistic 13-year-old Japanese boy entitled The Reason I Jump.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Reviewing Hari Kunzru's Gods without Men in the March 8, 2012, New York Times, Douglas Coupland coined the term translit to describe a new kind of novel that collapses time and space as it seeks to generate narrative traction in the reader's mind. The term itself has been gaining plenty of traction, too, as more and more writers adapt genre-bending strategies to a highly complex but entrancing form of literary fiction. Besides Kunzru, Haruki Murakami clearly falls into this category (especially his 1Q84, 2011), as does Nick Harkaway (in Angelmaker, 2012), but David Mitchell also deserves a seat at the head of the translit table, and his new book, The Bone Clocks, just may become the quintessential example of translit fiction, not only in its complexity and thematic richness, but also in the remarkable narrative propulsion that drives its many-cylindered engine. The book opens in the grand tradition of coming-of-age novels distinguished by their hypnotic, first-person narrators, but while the voice of British teenager Holly Sykes can hold its own with those of Holden Caulfield or John Green's Hazel Grace Lancaster, it is merely the opening salvo in this multivoiced, harmonically layered narrative symphony that stretches with occasional sojourns far back in time from the 1980s, when Holly runs away from home, into the 2040s, when she is attempting to cope with an oil-depleted world descending into chaos. But plot summaries are a far too simplistic device for talking about this novel. It is neither coming-of-age story nor dystopian fiction; nor is it fantasy, contemporary satire, or high-concept adventure thriller, though it surely has elements of all of those and more. That's the thing with translit: it shows us how feeble our pigeonholing genre categories can be when applied to a novel that sets out to break boundaries on multiple levels. Those boundaries begin to shatter when the young Holly hears what she calls the radio people, voices from another dimension. Gradually, Mitchell introduces us to an epic conflict being staged beyond the world of mundane life, a Harry Potter-like duel to the death between two groups able to traverse time: the Atemporals, also called Horologists, who are born with the capacity for living again after one self dies (they may die permanently, however, if they are killed before experiencing a natural death), and the Anchorites, who also have the psychic power to regenerate themselves but only if they feed (like vampires) off the souls of other psychically endowed mortals (like Holly). The Atemporals, led by a character called Marinus, a veteran of multiple lives over centuries, are trying both to save Holly from the Anchorites and to use her to help them deliver the coup de grâce that will wipe out the soul-decanting Anchorites forever. That sounds a little too cartoony, perhaps, but it doesn't read that way. Mitchell builds his characters as carefully as he does his worlds, and by the time the final battle takes place, we are thoroughly invested in the story and the people. By that time, too, we have followed those characters and many others through six time-jumping sections, each a smaller-scale tour de force of its own. Especially engaging is a section set essentially in the present and featuring a once-successful novelist watching his career slip away through a succession of writers' conferences that vividly capture the bane of creeping mediocrity. Remarkably, all of these disparate sections connect perfectly, not just as plot elements, but as aspects of a greater thematic whole. The novel is a meditation on mortality, of course, but also on the hazards of immortality and the perils of power. It is our failing novelist, though, who gives us the perfect metaphor for understanding the thematic reach of Mitchell's masterpiece. Rambling on about Icelandic literature at a conference in Reykjavík, he notes that writers are fascinated with the edges of maps. Those edges are at the heart of translit, and the The Bone Clocks delivers a finely detailed cartography of their every variation. This novel will be one of the most talked-about books of the year, as well it should be; it's a triumph on every one of its many levels.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"I DON'T summon anything up," protests Holly Sykes, the down-to-earth protagonist of "The Bone Clocks," David Mitchell's latest head-spinning flight into other dimensions. "Voices just ... nab me." She's trying to explain to a skeptical, curmudgeonly English writer how she occasionally falls out of time and sees what's going to happen next. Embarrassed about her gift - she's just a regular daughter of the owner of the Captain Marlow pub in Gravesend, Kent - and reluctant to credit such way-out ideas as precognition, she goes on, "Oh, Christ, I can't avoid the terminology, however crappy it sounds: I was channeling some sentience that was lingering in the fabric of that place." There you have it: a perfectly matter-of-fact, unvarnished evocation of how regular folks speak, married to a take-no-prisoners fascination with all that we can't explain. Coming from a writer himself famous for his gift for channeling voices (not least of pub-owners' daughters) and for his preternatural talent for seeing things, in the world, above it and all around it, the admission gives off a flash of unexpected self-revelation. (One recalls how the last novel Hilary Mantel published before her uncannily mediumistic "Wolf Hall" was about a woman full of demons who contacts the other world for a living.) "The Bone Clocks" - a perfect title for a novelist who's always close to the soil and orbiting the heavens in the same breath - is a typically maximalist many-storied construction: In one of its manifold secret corners, it sounds as if a sublimely original writer is wondering how much "writing's a pathology" (as one of his characters puts it) and whether it's possible to conjure up time-traveling characters and scenes from the distant past and future, yet not believe in magic. No one, clearly, has ever told Mitchell that the novel is dead. He writes with a furious intensity and slapped-awake vitality, with a delight in language and all the rabbit holes of experience, that no new media could begin to rival. (It's no coincidence that it was the makers of "The Matrix" who brought his previous epic, "Cloud Atlas," to the screen, in 2012, with limited success.) Mitchell sees the everyday with the startled freshness of a creature newly arrived from Epsilon Eridani, but amid all the glorious physical description - "The wood sounds like waves, with rooks tumbling about like black socks in a dryer" - there's always a trace of something metaphysical that lifts the roof off the contemporary novel and suggests there are many more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies. You may not believe in telepathy, second sight or reincarnation, but if you enter Mitchell's universe you can't not believe in them either. A deeply English writer born at the tail end of the 1960s, Mitchell began remaking fiction to his (extraterrestrial) specifications with his dazzling debut, "Ghostwritten," just before the turn of the millennium. Its nine disparate stories spin across eight countries, delivered with the dash and immediacy of a born storyteller, but seeded with just a hint of the idea that they're all in fact connected, and about the transmigration of the soul. In "Cloud Atlas," his third novel, Mitchell carried his intricate structuring even farther - some would say too far - to fashion a U-shaped series of interlocking stories that explored the idea of "eternal recurrence" all the way to a futuristic Korea and a post-apocalyptic world and back again. Having stretched language and narrative almost to the breaking point, he pulled back in his next one, "Black Swan Green," a resplendently textured coming-of-age story, set in England in 1982, about a 13-year-old boy whose super-alert sensitivity one could easily mistake for David Mitchell's. Now, in his sixth novel, he's brought together the time-capsule density of his eyes-wide-open adventure in traditional realism with the death-defying ambitions of "Cloud Atlas" until all borders between pubby England and the machinations of the undead begin to blur. from the first sentences of "The Bone Clocks," you know you're in David Mitchell Land. Fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes, ill-treated by a boyfriend and furious with her mother, runs away from home in 1984. We hear the "dozy-cow voice" of a woman she encounters. We watch sea gulls "scrawking for chips." We see how "the wind unravels clouds from the chimneys of the Blue Circle factory, like streams of hankies out of a conjurer's pocket." As ever, Mitchell writes a crunchily grounded, bitingly Anglo-Saxon prose that somehow makes room for the supernatural, as if D. H. Lawrence were reborn for the digital age. Yet even as Holly describes every Talking Heads record she listens to and notices how "the sea breeze and bike breeze... stroke my front like a pervy Mr. Tickle," a seasoned Mitchell decoder will observe that when the girl leaves Gravesend, she winds up in Allhallows-on-Sea, in St. Mary Hoo and Eastchurch. Some of the characters she meets are called Cross and Lamb and Bishop. And, to compound the existential shivers, this typical teenager, breathing in the smells of "warm tarmac, fried spuds and week-old rubbish," is prey to inexplicable visitations and "daymares" in which she slips into another universe. We're in the realm of hyper-realism and half-religious allegory all at once. In the chapters that follow, Mitchell characteristically vaults through six different worlds, crossing decades as effortlessly as in "Cloud Atlas" he leapt over epochs, and throwing off mini-novels that double as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Suddenly, we're in 1991, in the privileged circles of a too-clever Cambridge undergraduate. (Mitchell can go up and down the register of the English class system as few writers have done this side of Lawrence.) Then we're with an adrenaline-addicted war correspondent in Iraq in 2004; then on a global book tour in 2015 with a splenetic English novelist on the way down; then inside the mind of an African-Canadian clinical psychiatrist in the year 2025 (Metallica's still in the air) before ending up in a nuclear wilderness in 2043, after a deluge of viruses and natural disasters. Mitchell can do Norwegian letter-writers, early 19th-century Russian serf girls, Ph.D.s droning on about the soul as a "pre-Cartesian avatar." But a majority of his characters here are cads, borderline criminals and, most of all, scoffers who pride themselves on knowing that the "paranormal is always, always a hoax." Yet every time their plans precipitate disaster and even death, they turn to Providence to justify what's happened. The minute they do so, skeptics come to sound like believers. Meanwhile, not-quite-normal figures keep appearing and talking mysteriously about a "Script," opening an attic window to one of Mitchell's favorite themes - free will - and, by extension, how much of our lives and deeds we can ascribe to something beyond us. Not every part across these 624 pages is fresh. But with Mitchell it's the whole, the way he stitches the pieces together to make something greater than their sum, that makes the work unique. When the narrator in the second section starts reading from Joseph Conrad to a Brigadier Philby in a nursing home, one thinks back to the Captain Marlow pub, which now sounds like a Conrad allusion. With a passing glance at the Thousand Autumns Restaurant and an allusion, 448 pages on, to a character called de Zoet, with a reference to the Dutch settlement at Dejima in Japan, Mitchell invites us to see this book as somehow connected to his previous novel, "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet," partly set in Dejima. And as Holly keeps cropping up through the decades, even as a writer recounting events we've already witnessed, you realize you're entering a self-contained universe and mythology, half Joyce and half Tolkien, that follows its own laws, not least when it comes to gravity. As all this suggests, Mitchell is in love with possibility. His sentences jump and shine with rude health: "Icicles drip drops of bright in steep-sloped streets." And though his characters frequently off their rivals, there's an earnest warmth to his energy, a boyish delight in his sensory devouring of everything around him, that never gives off the sour taste or intellectualism of a lot of virtuoso fiction. He clearly believes not just in words, alternate realities, burps of synchronicity, but in the excitement of thinking about belief and extending its borders without losing the clank of the real. The many hard-core Mitchellites across the globe may also detect in this book a new concern with children and a tender parental solicitude, nicely encircled by his enduring respect for the elderly. In its penultimate section, the novel travels too far into Marvel Comicsdom for my tastes, and reads almost like a fresh "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" episode, something an unusually ingenious father might spin to his boys. As Atemporals take on the Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar to save the world and we read, "One, it's against the Codex. Two, she is chakra-latent, so she may react badly to scansion and redact her own memories," my eyes started to glaze over for all the uppercase neologisms and references to "psychosoterics of the Deep Stream." Even Holly, who has met these characters in the flesh, says, "You lost me at 'Atemporals.'" For my money, Mitchell is far better at suggesting mystery than at pulling off creatures of the "Shaded Way." Action is not his forte; he's a wizard, rather, at dialogue and "air shimmering with bells and cold as mountain streams," the dizzying lights of Shanghai, the sun-baked wastes of Iraq and the Marine talk that crackles across them. His take on everyday life is so alive and so much his own that it seems a waste when he starts inventing realities, as so many other writers do. But no matter. In his final section, Mitchell brings his narrative boat back into the harbor with another arrow-sharp vignette, this one set in rural Ireland in the year 2043, as the electricity's running out, the Internet seems about to crash for good and people are reduced to foraging for rabbits and eating dried seaweed. Again he catches every last earthbound detail and cadence - "A mistle thrush is singing on my spade in the kale patch" - even as he suggests, in a larger way, that civilization itself is an act of faith, the myth we create together to keep ourselves going. We're a little farther from "The Lord of the Rings" here, back in the primal landscape that seems to be one of Mitchell's spiritual homes, rich with the elementalism of a reborn "Lord of the Flies." Not many novelists could take on plausible Aboriginal speech, imagine a world after climate change has ravaged it and wonder whether whales suffer from unrequited love. One thinks of Holly quoting a wise elder: "Life's a matter of Who Dares Wins." Other writers may be more moving, and some may push deeper, but very few excite the reader about both the visceral world and the visionary one as Mitchell does. Where "Black Swan Green" introduced a typical English boy with a stammer who had to reinvent language to avoid words beginning with certain letters, "The Bone Clocks" begins to suggest how a great writer "flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder" to give us an astonishing ventriloquism that regularly expands our lives. All borders between pubby England and the machinations of the undead begin to blur. PICO IYER is a distinguished presidential fellow at Chapman University. His most recent book is "The Man Within My Head."
Guardian Review
On the July day that I sat down to write a review of a novel due to be published in September, I learned that it had just been longlisted for the Man Booker prize. This rather took the wind out of my sails. I felt as if I should say "Bound for glory!" and leave it at that. Certainly the book invites the prediction. With 600 pages of metafictional shenanigans in relentlessly brilliant prose, The Bone Clocks hits lots of hot buttons, from the horrors of the Iraq war to the Eternal Battle of Good and Evil to the near-future downfall of our civilisation. It aims unerringly and from many directions at success. At one point it even includes a waspish book review of a similar literary project, and the temptation to quote is irresistible: "One: [the author] is so bent on avoiding cliche that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower. Two: the fantasy subplot clashes so violently with the book's State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: what surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are running dry than a writer creating a writer-character?" The review is too nasty to be just, but its self-protective mockery does provide a good example of an outstanding quality of the book: self-consciousness. In its vast inventiveness, its exploitation of trendy pop-cult stereotypes (soul-sucking vampires, anyone?), its jaunty hops between holocausts, the novel reminded me of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union; but where Chabon is genuinely freewheeling, Mitchell's daring is somehow anxious. He watches his steps, always. Reading Chabon, I'm carefree; reading Mitchell, I feel cautious, uncertain. The story is narrated in the first person by five very different voices, at six different times from 1984 to 2043; among them a 15-year-old girl writing in the general tone of a Young Adult thriller, a consummately self-parodic prick of a writer writing in anglo-mandarin who bears more than a passing resemblance to Martin Amis (one novel is called, ahem, Desiccated Embryos), and a semi-immortal bodyshifter. I find these radical shifts of time and person difficult, and, though willing to suspend disbelief, am uncertain when to do so. Am I to believe in the hocus-pocus of the secret cult of the Blind Cathar in the same way I am to believe in the realistic portrayal of the death agonies of corporate capitalism - or should I believe in them in different ways? How many novels is it? If it is one, I just don't see how it hangs together. Or maybe its not hanging together is the point, and I'm not getting it. There you are: anxiety in the writer makes the reader anxious too. In its temporal leaps, and in the stream-of-consciousness narration (or stream of self-consciousness), The Bone Clocks can be compared to Woolf's The Years and The Waves. But The Years is told in the past tense, and the voices that tell The Waves are always framed by it: Jinny said, Louis said . . . Here, in a novel deeply concerned with Time, there is virtually no past tense. Present-tense narration is now taken for granted by many fiction readers because everything they read, from internet news to texting, is in the present tense, but at this great length it can be hard going. Past-tense narration easily implies previous times and extends into the misty reaches of the subjunctive, the conditional, the future; but the pretence of a continuous eyewitness account admits little relativity of times, little connection between events. The present tense is a narrowbeam flashlight in the dark, limiting the view to the next step - now, now, now. No past, no future. The world of the infant, of the animal, perhaps of the immortal. While learning how it is that some of the characters are, indeed, more or less immortal, we get a glimpse of a scene that to me stands out in silence from the jangle of dazzle-language and the kaleidoscopic tumult of imagery and filmic cliche. We see it again just before an extended climactic orgy of violence. Nothing in the plot appears to depend directly on this vision or refer back to it, yet I came away from the book with the sense that it is the still centre of all the frenetic action. "The Dusk," says Arkady, "between life and death. We see it from the High Ridge. It's a beautiful, fearsome sight. All the souls, the pale lights, crossing over, blown by the Seaward Wind to the Last Sea. Which of course isn't really a sea at all . . . . . . a west window offers a view over one mile or a hundred miles of dunes, up to the High Ridge and the Light of Day. Holly follows me. "See up there?" I tell her. "That's where we're from." "Then all those little pale lights," whispers Holly, "crossing the sand, they're souls?" "Yes. Thousands and thousands, at any given time." We walk over to the eastern window, where an inexact distance of dunes rolls down through darkening twilight to the Last Sea. "And that's where they're bound." We watch the little lights enter the starless extremity and go out, one by one by one. Sketchy as it is, this has to me the quality of a true vision. For all the stuff and nonsense about escaping mortality by switching bodies and devouring souls, death is at the heart of this novel. And there lies its depth and darkness, bravely concealed with all the wit and sleight of hand and ventriloquistic verbiage and tale-telling bravura of which Mitchell is a master. Whatever prizes it wins or doesn't, The Bone Clocks will be a great success, and it deserves to be, because a great many people will enjoy reading it very much. It's a whopper of a story. And in it, under all the klaxons and saxophones and Irish fiddles, is that hidden, haunting silence at the centre. Behind the narrative fireworks is the shadow that, maybe, makes it true. Ursula K Le Guin's The Unreal and the Real is published by Gollancz. To order The Bone Clocks for pounds 15.49 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Ursula K Le Guin The review is too nasty to be just, but its self-protective mockery does provide a good example of an outstanding quality of the book: self-consciousness. In its vast inventiveness, its exploitation of trendy pop-cult stereotypes (soul-sucking vampires, anyone?), its jaunty hops between holocausts, the novel reminded me of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union; but where Chabon is genuinely freewheeling, Mitchell's daring is somehow anxious. He watches his steps, always. Reading Chabon, I'm carefree; reading Mitchell, I feel cautious, uncertain. The story is narrated in the first person by five very different voices, at six different times from 1984 to 2043; among them a 15-year-old girl writing in the general tone of a Young Adult thriller, a consummately self-parodic prick of a writer writing in anglo-mandarin who bears more than a passing resemblance to Martin Amis (one novel is called, ahem, Desiccated Embryos), and a semi-immortal bodyshifter. . . . a west window offers a view over one mile or a hundred miles of dunes, up to the High Ridge and the Light of Day. Holly follows me. "See up there?" I tell her. "That's where we're from." "Yes. Thousands and thousands, at any given time." We walk over to the eastern window, where an inexact distance of dunes rolls down through darkening twilight to the Last Sea. "And that's where they're bound." We watch the little lights enter the starless extremity and go out, one by one by one. - Ursula K Le Guin.
Kirkus Review
Mitchells latest could have been called The Rime of the Ancient Marinusthe youthful ancient Marinus, that is. Another exacting, challenging and deeply rewarding novel from logophile and time-travel master Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, 2004, etc.).As this long (but not too long) tale opens, were in the familiar territory of Mitchells Black Swan Green (2006)Thatchers England, that is. A few dozen pages in, and Mitchell has subverted all that. At first its 1984, and Holly Sykes, a 15-year-old suburban runaway, is just beginning to suss out that its a scary, weird place, if with no shortage of goodwilled protectors. She wants nothing but to get away: The Thames is riffled and muddy blue today, and I walk and walk and walk away from Gravesend towards the Kent marshes and before I know it, its 11:30 and the towns a little model of itself, a long way behind me. Farther down the road, Holly has her first inkling of a strange world in which Horologists bound up with one Yu Leon Marinus and, well, sort-of-neo-Cathars are having it out, invited into Hollys reality thanks to a tear in her psychic fabric. Are they real? As one strange inhabitant of a daymare asks, But why would two dying, fleeing incorporeals blunder their way to you, Holly Sykes? Why indeed? The next 600 pages explain why in a course that moves back and forth among places (Iceland, Switzerland, Iraq, New York), times and states of reality: Holly finds modest success in midlife even as we bone clocks tick our way down to a society of her old age that will remind readers of the world of Slooshas Crossin from Cloud Atlas: The oil supply has dried up, the poles are melting, gangs roam the land, and the old days are a long way behind us. We live on, says an ever unreliable narrator by way of resigned closing, as long as there are people to live on in.If Thatchers 1984 is bleak, then get a load of what awaits us in 2030. Speculative, lyrical and unrelentingly darktrademark Mitchell, in other words. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Using a variation of the storytelling structure he employed in Cloud Atlas, Mitchell weaves six interrelated first-person narratives into an epic tale that "follows" the character Holly Sykes from 1984 to 2043. Mitchell presents the reader with everyday human experiences that carry the hint-and sometimes more than a hint-of something supernatural affecting the lives of people ("bone clocks") on Earth. Clever, engaging, and often fun (readers of earlier Mitchell works should look for familiar characters), this novel is slightly flawed but eventually successful. The flaw is in the fifth narrative, in which listeners learn about those supernatural beings, immortals ("atemporals") who are waging an epic battle between good and evil; the storytelling here becomes slightly tedious but finds its footing again in the sixth and final narrative. VERDICT Although this type of story structure can be difficult to follow in audio form, the use of six readers-Jessica Ball, Leon Williams, Colin Mace, Steven Crossley, Laurel Lefkow, and Anna Bentinck-helps listeners find their way through this sweeping and ultimately extremely satisfying tale. ["Quite a lot of book and not for easy-reading fans, but it's brilliant," read the starred review of the Random hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 10/10/14; an LJ Top Ten Best Book of 2014.]-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
June 30 I fling open my bedroom curtains, and there's the thirsty sky and the wide river full of ships and boats and stuff, but I'm already thinking of Vinny's chocolaty eyes, shampoo down Vinny's back, beads of sweat on Vinny's shoulders, and Vinny's sly laugh, and by now my heart's going mental and, God, I wish I was waking up at Vinny's place in Peacock Street and not in my own stupid bedroom. Last night, the words just said themselves, "Christ, I really love you, Vin," and Vinny puffed out a cloud of smoke and did this Prince Charles voice, "One must say, one's frightfully partial to spending time with you too, Holly Sykes," and I nearly weed myself laughing, though I was a bit narked he didn't say "I love you too" back. If I'm honest. Still, boyfriends act goofy to hide stuff, any magazine'll tell you. Wish I could phone him right now. Wish they'd invent phones you can speak to anyone anywhere anytime on. He'll be riding his Norton to work in Rochester right now, in his leather jacket with led zep spelled out in silver studs. Come September, when I turn sixteen, he'll take me out on his Norton. Someone slams a cupboard door, below. Mam. No one else'd dare slam a door like that. Suppose she's found out? says a twisted voice. No. We've been too careful, me and Vinny. She's menopausal, is Mam. That'll be it. Talking Heads' Fear of Music is on my record player, so I lower the stylus. Vinny bought me this LP, the second Saturday we met at Magic Bus Records. It's an amazing record. I like "Heaven" and "Memories Can't Wait" but there's not a weak track on it. Vinny's been to New York and actually saw Talking Heads, live. His mate Dan was on security and got Vinny backstage after the gig, and he hung out with David Byrne and the band. If he goes back next year, he's taking me. I get dressed, finding each love bite and wishing I could go to Vinny's tonight, but he's meeting a bunch of mates in Dover. Men hate it when women act jealous, so I pretend not to be. My best friend Stella's gone to London to hunt for secondhand clothes at Camden Market. Mam says I'm still too young to go to London without an adult so Stella took Ali Jessop instead. My biggest thrill today'll be hoovering the bar to earn my three pounds' pocket money. Whoopy-doo. Then I've got next week's exams to revise for. But for two pins I'd hand in blank papers and tell school where to shove Pythagoras triangles and Lord of the Flies and their life cycles of worms. I might, too. Yeah. I might just do that. Down in the kitchen, the atmosphere's like Antarctica. "Morning," I say, but only Jacko looks up from the window-seat where he's drawing. Sharon's through in the lounge part, watching a cartoon. Dad's downstairs in the hallway, talking with the delivery guy--the truck from the brewery's grumbling away in front of the pub. Mam's chopping cooking apples into cubes, giving me the silent treatment. I'm supposed to say, "What's wrong, Mam, what have I done?" but sod that for a game of soldiers. Obviously she noticed I was back late last night, but I'll let her raise the topic. I pour some milk over my Weetabix and take it to the table. Mam clangs the lid onto the pan and comes over. "Right. What have you got to say for yourself?" "Good morning to you too, Mam. Another hot day." "What have you got to say for yourself, young lady?" If in doubt, act innocent. " 'Bout what exactly?" Her eyes go all snaky. "What time did you get home?" "Okay, okay, so I was a bit late, sorry." "Two hours isn't 'a bit late.' Where were you?" I munch my Weetabix. "Stella's. Lost track of time." "Well, that's peculiar, now, it really is. At ten o'clock I phoned Stella's mam to find out where the hell you were, and guess what? You'd left before eight. So who's the liar here, Holly? You or her?" Shit. "After leaving Stella's, I went for a walk." "And where did your walk take you to?" I sharpen each word. "Along the river, all right?" "Upstream or downstream, was it, this little walk?" I let a silence go by. "What diff'rence does it make?" There're some cartoon explosions on the telly. Mam tells my sister, "Turn that thing off and shut the door behind you, Sharon." "That's not fair! Holly's the one getting told off." "Now, Sharon. And you too, Jacko, I want--" But Jacko's already vanished. When Sharon's left, Mam takes up the attack again: "All alone, were you, on your 'walk'?" Why this nasty feeling she's setting me up? "Yeah." "How far d'you get on your 'walk,' then, all alone?" "What--you want miles or kilometers?" "Well, perhaps your little walk took you up Peacock Street, to a certain someone called Vincent Costello?" The kitchen sort of swirls, and through the window, on the Essex shore of the river, a tiny stick-man's lifting his bike off the ferry. "Lost for words all of a sudden? Let me jog your memory: ten o'clock last night, closing the blinds, front window, wearing a T-shirt and not a lot else." Yes, I did go downstairs to get Vinny a lager. Yes, I did lower the blind in the front room. Yes, someone did walk by. Relax, I'd told myself. What's the chances of one stranger recognizing me? Mam's expecting me to crumple, but I don't. "You're wasted as a barmaid, Mam. You ought to be handling supergrasses for MI5." Mam gives me the Kath Sykes Filthy Glare. "How old is he?" Now I fold my arms. "None of your business." Mam's eyes go slitty. "Twenty-four, apparently." "If you already know, why're you asking?" "Because a twenty-four-year-old man interfering with a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl is illegal. He could go to prison." "I'll be sixteen in September, and I reckon the Kent police have bigger fish to fry. I'm old enough to make up my own mind about my relationships." Mam lights one of her Marlboro Reds. I'd kill for one. "When I tell your father, he'll flay this Costello fella alive." Sure, Dad has to persuade piss-artists off the premises from time to time, all landlords do, but he's not the flaying-anyone-alive type. "Brendan was fifteen when he was going out with Mandy Fry, and if you think they were just holding hands on the swings, they weren't. Don't recall him getting the 'You could go to prison' treatment." She spells it out like I'm a moron: "It's--different--for--boys." I do an I-do-not-believe-what-I'm-hearing snort. "I'm telling you now, Holly, you'll be seeing this . . . car salesman again over my dead body." "Actually, Mam, I'll bloody see who I bloody well want!" "New rules." Mam stubs out her fag. "I'm taking you to school and fetching you back in the van. You don't set foot outside unless it's with me, your father, Brendan, or Ruth. If I glimpse this cradle snatcher anywhere near here, I'll be on the blower to the police to press charges--yes, I will, so help me God. And--and--I'll call his employer and let them know that he's seducing underage schoolgirls." Big fat seconds ooze by while all of this sinks in. My tear ducts start twitching but there's no way I'm giving Mrs. Hitler the pleasure. "This isn't Saudi Arabia! You can't lock me up!" "Live under our roof, you obey our rules. When I was your age--" "Yeah yeah yeah, you had twenty brothers and thirty sisters and forty grandparents and fifty acres of spuds to dig 'cause that was how life was in Auld feckin' Oireland but this is England, Mam, England! And it's the 1980s and if life was so feckin' glorious in that West Cork bog why did you feckin' bother even coming to--" Whack! Smack over the left side of my face. We look at each other: me trembling with shock and Mam angrier than I've ever seen her, and--I reckon--knowing she's just broken something that'll never be mended. I leave the room without a word, as if I've just won an argument. I only cry a bit, and it's shocked crying, not boo-hoo crying, and when I'm done I go to the mirror. My eyes're a bit puffy, but a bit of eyeliner soon sorts that out . . . Dab of lippy, bit of blusher . . . Sorted. The girl in the mirror's a woman, with her cropped black hair, her Quadrophenia T-shirt, her black jeans. "I've got news for you," she says. "You're moving in with Vinny today." I start listing the reasons why I can't, and stop. "Yes," I agree, giddy and calm at once. I'm leaving school, as well. As from now. The summer holidays'll be here before the truancy officer can fart, and I'm sixteen in September, and then it's stuff you, Windmill Hill Comprehensive. Do I dare? I dare. Pack, then. Pack what? Whatever'll fit into my big duffel bag. Underwear, bras, T-shirts, my bomber jacket; makeup case and the Oxo tin with my bracelets and necklaces in. Toothbrush and a handful of tampons--my period's a bit late so it should start, like, any hour now. Money. I count up £13.85 saved in notes and coins. I've £80 more in my TSB bankbook. It's not like Vinny'll charge me rent, and I'll look for a job next week. Babysitting, working in the market, waitressing: There's loads of ways to earn a few quid. What about my LPs? I can't lug the whole collection over to Peacock Street now, and Mam's quite capable of dumping them at the Oxfam shop out of spite, so I just take Fear of Music, wrapping it carefully in my bomber jacket and putting it into my bag so it won't get bent. I hide the others under the loose floorboard, just for now, but as I'm putting the carpet back, I get the fright of my life: Jacko's watching me from the doorway. He's still in his Thunderbirds pajamas and slippers. I tell him, "Mister, you just gave me a heart attack." "You're going." Jacko's got this not-quite-here voice. "Just between us, yes, I am. But not far, don't worry." "I've made you a souvenir, to remember me by." Jacko hands me a circle of cardboard--a flattened Dairylea cheese box with a maze drawn on. He's mad about mazes, is Jacko; it's all these Dungeons & Dragonsy books him and Sharon read. The one Jacko's drawn's actually dead simple by his standards, made of eight or nine circles inside each other. "Take it," he tells me. "It's diabolical." "It doesn't look all that bad to me." " 'Diabolical' means 'satanic,' sis." "Why's your maze so satanic, then?" "The Dusk follows you as you go through it. If it touches you, you cease to exist, so one wrong turn down a dead end, that's the end of you. That's why you have to learn the labyrinth by heart." Christ, I don't half have a freaky little brother. "Right. Well, thanks, Jacko. Look, I've got a few things to--" Jacko holds my wrist. "Learn this labyrinth, Holly. Indulge your freaky little brother. Please." That jolts me a bit. "Mister, you're acting all weird." "Promise me you'll memorize the path through it, so if you ever needed to, you could navigate it in the darkness. Please." My friends' little brothers are all into Scalextric or BMX or Top Trumps--why do I get one who does this and says words like "navigate" and "diabolical"? Christ only knows how he'll survive in Gravesend if he's gay. I muss his hair. "Okay, I promise to learn your maze off by heart." Then Jacko hugs me, which is weird 'cause Jacko's not a huggy kid. "Hey, I'm not going far . . . You'll understand when you're older, and--" "You're moving in with your boyfriend." By now I shouldn't be surprised. "Yeah." "Take care of yourself, Holly." "Vinny's nice. Once Mam's got used to the idea, we'll see each other--I mean, we still saw Brendan after he married Ruth, yeah?" But Jacko just puts the cardboard lid with his maze on deep into my duffel bag, gives me one last look, and disappears. *** Mam appears with a basket of bar rugs on the first-floor landing, as if she wasn't lying in wait. "I'm not bluffing. You're grounded. Back upstairs. You've got exams next week. Time you knuckled down and got some proper revision done." I grip the banister. " 'Our roof, our rules,' you said. Fine. I don't want your rules, or your roof, or you hitting me whenever you lose your rag. You'd not put up with that. Would you?" Mam's face sort of twitches, and if she says the right thing now, we'll negotiate. But no, she just takes in my duffel bag and sneers like she can't believe how stupid I am. "You had a brain, once." So I carry on down the stairs to the ground floor. Above me, her voice tightens. "What about school?" "You go, then, if school's so important!" "I never had the bloody chance, Holly! I've always had the pub to run, and you and Brendan and Sharon and Jacko to feed, clothe, and send to school so you won't have to spend your life mopping out toilets and emptying ashtrays and knackering your back and never having an early night." Water off a duck's back. I carry on downstairs. "But go on, then. Go. Learn the hard way. I'll give you three days before Romeo turfs you out. It's not a girl's glittering personality that men're interested in, Holly. It never bloody is." I ignore her. From the hallway I see Sharon behind the bar by the fruit juice shelves. She's helping Dad do the restocking, but I can see she heard. I give her a little wave and she gives me one back, nervous. Echoing up from the cellar trapdoor is Dad's voice, crooning "Ferry 'Cross the Mersey." Better leave him out of it. In front of Mam, he'll side with her. In front of the regulars, it'll be "It takes a bigger idiot than me to step between the pecking hens" and they'll all nod and mumble, "Right enough there, Dave." Plus I'd rather not be in the room when he finds out 'bout Vinny. Not that I'm ashamed, I'd just rather not be there. Newky's snoozing in his basket. "You're the smelliest dog in Kent," I tell him to stop myself crying, "you old fleabag." I pat his neck, unbolt the side door, and step into Marlow Alley. Behind me, the door goes clunk. West Street's too bright and too dark, like a TV with the contrast on the blink, so I put on my sunglasses and they turn the world all dreamish and vivider and more real. My throat aches and I'm shaking a bit. Nobody's running after me from the pub. Good. A cement truck trundles by and its fumy gust makes the conker tree sway a bit and rustle. Breathe in warm tarmac, fried spuds, and week-old rubbish spilling out of the bins--the dustmen are on strike again. Lots of little darting birds're twirly-whirlying like the tin-whistlers on strings kids get at birthdays, or used to, and a gang of boys're playing Kick the Can in the park round the church at Crooked Lane. Get him! Behind the tree! Set me free! Kids. Stella says older men make better lovers; with boys our age, she says, the ice cream melts once the cone's in your hand. Only Stella knows 'bout Vinny--she was there that first Saturday in the Magic Bus--but she can keep a secret. When she was teaching me to smoke and I kept puking, she didn't laugh or tell anyone, and she's told me everything I need to know 'bout boys. Stella's the coolest girl in our year at school, easy. Crooked Lane veers up from the river, and from there I turn up Queen Street, where I'm nearly mown down by Julie Walcott pushing her pram. Her baby's bawling its head off and she looks knackered. She left school when she got pregnant. Me and Vinny are dead careful, and we only had sex once without a condom, our first time, and it's a scientific fact that virgins can't get pregnant. Stella told me. Excerpted from The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
