The Bone Clocks by David MitchellMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on 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 from occupied 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.
I could have given this book the full five-star rating, and I still wonder if I'm being a little too hard on it. It's a wonderful book, well-written, gripping storyline, which kept my interest throughout -- except when it didn't. Its main drawback, I found, is something it has in common with other multi-POV narratives I've read; some characters just aren't as interesting as others.
Actually, this book doesn't just change its POV character every so often -- it also jumps ahead decades at a time. Each new section drops you into a whole new story: new characters, new time period, new setting, new circumstances. Only gradually does it start to tie it back to previous sections, and to the larger narrative. And most of the time it works fabulously. It's only a few instances where my interest started to lag, though even then the connection to the larger narrative kept me plodding on.
Over all, a very engaging read despite a few slow moments.
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