An exhilarating journey

Steve Walker is impressed with The Bone Clocks – one of the hot favourites for this year’s Man Booker.

I must confess that, up to now, I have not been a fan of David Mitchell. I have found his mix of sci-fi and realism difficult, his plots implausible.

With his latest, Man Bookerlonglisted The Bone Clocks, I am a convert.

This is a remarkable exercise in multiple ventriloquism. Mitchell takes a cast list of very different characters, from varied backgrounds and epochs, and manages to sound authentic each and every time.

It has all the usual Mitchell hallmarks; future speculation, humour, lyricism and a darkly sinister undertone. It commands attention as a brilliant evocation of several ages, which then subverts them with a plot that twists wildly away from the real and quotidian, into the realms of fantasy. Mitchell takes as his starting point one Holly Sykes. It is 1984 and Margaret Thatcher is transforming Britain to suit her own iron will. The miners are on strike and the fabric of the nation is being ripped asunder. Holly is a troubled teenager in Gravesend. Cheated on by her boyfriend and best friend, and harassed by an intolerant mother, she decides to leave home.

Holly asks for water from a woman, Esther Little, on the pier. She, in turn, asks for ‘‘asylum’’. Esther then adds the ominous rider, ‘‘if the First Mission fails’’. That is the first clue that there is a dark undertow.

Holly, however, has another problem. She has been hearing voices in her head, from a Miss Constantin. She has been seeing a psychiatrist, Dr Marinus, for help. These four characters form the basis of a plot that will leap from the Thames, to the French Alps, to New York, Perth, Iraq, Ireland and well into the future.

It seems as if characters are reincarnated into each other. Holly disappears from England, only to reappear as a barmaid in a club high in the Alps. Miss Constantin will attempt to seduce one Hugo Lamb, a rather amoral Cambridge undergraduate. Marinus resurfaces in Toronto in 2025 on a mission to ‘‘locate and liberate [Little’s] reravelled soul from its asylum’’. All are wrapped up in a ‘‘parallax of memories’’.

Mitchell’s great feat here is that each of the seven major episodes is credible in its own terms, whether they be realist or speculative. His command of Holly’s estuarine English is uncanny – and amusing. Likewise, he captures exactly the etiolated hauteur of a gilded Cambridge elite, the quasi-military jumpiness of the war reporter in Iraq, and the narcissistic self-regard of a second-rate writer. When he indulges in pure fantasy, in a clash of superheroes, the writing is taut and electrifying.

There is a real danger, in so many jump cuts, of losing the reader en route. Mitchell cleverly avoids that trap with his integrated plotting. He can write in a detail early on, then bring it back 300 pages later. Readers are kept intrigued by trying to work out the identity of new characters. Intertextual references, to Golding, Atwood, Chomsky, Shelley and many others keep us guessing.

There is much humour in this travel through the world and time. Mitchell’s satire on writers and their festivals is sharp and pointed. The Green Zone in Baghdad is ‘‘lit up like Disneyland in Dystopia’’. When a writer tries to escape a sci-fi convention in Brighton, he asks a Yoda for the way out. The Yoda replies, ‘‘Next to the bogs, pal’’! London traffic is like a ‘‘glacial stampede’’. Even the final battle is rendered comic with Mitchell’s satire of sci-fi cliches – I was taken with the idea of ‘‘psychodumdums’’ as weapons.

There is, underneath it all, a serious purpose. Mitchell’s meditations on writing and the criminal disregard for our planet’s health make for thoughtprovoking material.

It is the humour that makes the speculative palatable. The characters are the guiding thread through this interwoven leapfrogging. All in all, they make for a challenging, entertaining and exhilarating journey.