#THE BONE CLOCKX FULL#

4Ĭlaiming that The Bone Clocks is about Holly Sykes from birth to death may seem misleading. It is a destruction that we, like Mitchell’s characters, so often and so easily ignore and to which we actively continue to contribute. Exploring how, through its narrative ellipses, The Bone Clocks offers a story of complacent disregard as the world spirals into nightmare, I argue that the novel thereby cautions us to mind the gaps-to pay attention to what Rob Nixon ( 2011) has termed the ‘slow violence’ of attritional environmental destruction. Within that null narrative time, however, significant events in Holly’s life play out, a crucial but largely invisible war between two sets of immortals takes place, and the world descends into the equivalent of ‘a plotless never-ending disaster movie’ as a result of climate change ( Mitchell 2014: 551). 3 The chronological storyline of the novel covers Holly Sykes’s lifetime from metaphoric birth to death, but most of that span is not narrated. The ellipses or gaps in temporal continuity heighten our awareness of humanity’s destructive impact on our planet. I push the Anthropocene argument in a different direction by focusing on how the novel’s discontinuous structure, its deliberate withholding of key information, prompts us readers to construct cause-effect sequences ourselves. Rose Harris-Birtill examines the function of ‘reincarnation time’ in the novel, not a ‘literal belief in reincarnation but living as if the individual will be reborn to see their own behavioural consequences,’ which can constitute an ethical approach to the Anthropocene ( 2017: 174). Paul Harris discusses it in terms of labyrinthine time: ‘a thought experiment about time, identity, and mortality when seen through the lens of the Anthropocene’s deep duration’ ( 2015b: 152). 2 Patrick O’Donnell regards the novel as ‘an allegory of mortality’ in which ‘the planet as a whole has taken the predictable death-spiral course charted from the beginning’ ( 2015: 158). With its vast time-scale, The Bone Clocks, like Cloud Atlas (2004) before it, is a novel of the Anthropocene, the geologic time period defined by humanity’s impact upon the earth, including geologic-scale changes of land, rivers, and seas and an alteration of the atmosphere. However, while filling in gaps in the timeline of the macronovel, The Bone Clocks pointedly draws our attention to the temporal gaps in its own storyline.

Lucas Marinus from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010). Thus, for example, The Bone Clocks gives us new information about the fates of Mo Muntervary from Ghostwritten (1999), Hugo Lamb from Black Swan Green (2007), and Dr.

Some of these gaps are filled in by new additions to the macronovel.

#THE BONE CLOCKX FULL#

1Įach individual narrative in this corpus occupies a discrete temporal space on a grand trajectory-a trajectory that is necessarily full of gaps. It is The Bone Clocks, in fact, that reinforces Mitchell’s macronovelistic aims, clarifying that the recurring characters are all participating in an ongoing narrative across Mitchell’s corpus. Mitchell thus draws on a vast time-scale that enables readers to draw connections between causes in the long-ago past and effects in the distant future. At this point, the macronovel’s implied narrative trajectory extends from seven millennia in the past (the birth of Moombaki/Esther Little from The Bone Clocks) to several hundred years in the future (the post-apocalyptic world in which Zachry of Cloud Atlas resides). Smith et al., ‘Strata and Time’Ī self-proclaimed ‘maximalist world-builder’ ( Mitchell 2015: 16), David Mitchell has described each of his various novels, short stories, and libretti as ‘one chapter in a sort of sprawling macronovel’ ( Mason 2010). T is the gaps in the record that provide much of its organizational structure, and hence its information content. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor Our empires will go on forever.’ Neil Gaiman, ‘A Calendar of Tales’īy slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. We see the leaves cooking on the trees on a hot August day, and we still don’t believe anything’s really going to change.

The bone clockx