I’m a huge fan of David Mitchell. I’ve always admired his ability to created characters with various and compelling voices. This was particularly true of Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas, and Black Swan Green.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was a departure. As I wrote at the time, Mitchell was playing with the idea of the idea of evil. It was an examination of how best to respond to pure evil.

He continues that exploration in The Bone Clocks. Here, though, the evil has become less nuanced. (In fairness there is one exception to this.)

As I read through the book, I realised that although the characters were somewhat interesting, their voices weren’t nearly as compelling as Mitchell’s previous characters. I was disappointed and bemused.

As I reached the end of the book, I realised that these two things—pure evil and lacklustre voices—were related. When the antagonists of a story lack nuance, it is difficult to create nuanced protagonists.

There are things that did like about this book. The near future feels real. It’s described with an everyday nonchalance that isn’t at all intrusive. I still love Mitchell’s straight-forward descriptive prose, especially the way he describes gestures and facial expressions. And there are still occasional glimpses of those extraordinary character voices that Mitchell
does so well, but they feel few and far between.

(If you haven’t read the book, it is probably best to skip this next paragraph.) Although the last chapter of the book feels tacked on, I think that it is the chapter I enjoyed most because for the most part it didn’t suffer from the simplistic good vs evil structure of the rest of the book. It raised interesting questions about our responsibility for the future. The baddies were ordinary people who had ordinary reasons for their actions. However, the final resolution of the book—with its “friends-in-high-places will save you” theme—left a bad taste in my mouth.

That may well be the point Mitchell is trying to make: that when it comes down to survival the good aren’t as good as we’d like to believe they are. If so, it would be a brilliant way to structure a book: to have the final resolution undo everything that has gone before. But only if what came before was convincing and compelling. For this reader, that simply wasn’t the case.