The Bone Clocks / David Mitchell 624 pp.

Bone Clocks, David Mitchell's latest, comes embedded with a print soundtrack.  For each of the book's eras - '80s, '90s, 2010s, etc., he shares the music his characters hear in a way that adds texture and depth to the story.  So it is fitting that I write my review with a song in mind.  It's Sedaka's Breaking up Is Hard to Do.  Careful Blog readers will recall my love bordering on creepy stalker passion for Mitchell's writing in Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Even Number9dream, while not a fantastic book, was a very good one.  But in Bone Clocks, it's not me, it's him.  Or we've just grown apart.  Or something.

Holly Sykes has always heard voices and had nighttime visitors that no one else can see.  So when as a teenager she has a terrifying vision in a tunnel, followed by witnessing a hideous double murder which memory is later redacted, we know that her otherness is gravely important.  (But redacted?  Seriously?  I can watch the X-Files by my ownself, thank you.)

The story follows Holly over her long life, which stretches years ahead of our own time.  We learn that there are Temporals, who live outside of time, in a continuous cycle of rebirth.  They fight the Anchorites, who would like to be Temporal, but can only do so by decanting souls from the living.  We read the story from the points of view of different characters, such as Holly's husband Ed and her short-term lover Hugo Lamb, a delightfully sinister character recycled from the novel Black Swan Green.  Particularly annoying is the long section devoted to Holly's later life friend Crispin, a middle-aged author whose best days are behind him.  He doesn't figure into the plot, really, making it seem that Mitchell has asked his audience to read over 100 pages of semi-autobiographical whining about not winning the Booker.  (Justified whining, but distasteful nevertheless.)  In sum, the novel is 80% character development, with a brief action-packed climax, followed by a frighteningly real post-apocalyptic epilogue.  It has an angry, anti- quality -  anti-Booker committee, anti-religion, anti-Chinese, mild anti-Americanism -  but doesn't compensate us with a compelling mythology or deep meaning.