Frances started reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6)

"Fans of David Mitchell who can remember simple things like characters� names will enjoy the callbacks to his earlier novels. Those who can’t remember shit might find themselves like me doing a lot of Wikipedia plot summary searches to see if they are missing any little surprises for each character that passes through The Bone Clocks.

I don’t think that it’s important to have read all of Mitchell’s earlier books to enjoy this one. And I don’t think I’m saying that just to make myself feel better about having spent the past week reading this book and waiting online to get a signed ARC of the book for about two hours (even though physically it is probably the nicest looking ARC given away at this years BEA).

The book roughly follows the life of Holly Sykes who, is first seen in 1984 as a fifteen year old getting into a fight with her mom after mom discovers Holly hadn’t spent the previous night at a friends house but was off shagging her twenty something year old cool guy boyfriend. Mum slaps Holly. Holly packs her bags, gives her parents two fingers in the air and because fifteen year olds always make the best decision, she heads off to live with ‘the love of her life�.

The first section of the book covers fifteen year old (I’ll be sixteen in just a couple of months) Holly’s adventure.

The next five sections are each told from a different characters perspective and move linearly through time. In varying degrees each section features Holly and the reader learns more about her and is caught up with what has been happening to her, but in most of these sections it is the other characters who are the real focus of the stories.

The way that Mitchell tells the stories in the first four sections is quite good. I wanted to say fun but that might not be the best word to use (although the ‘Martin Amis� section is quite fun (it is supposed to be him, right?)), these sections are sort of their own self-contained worlds like the sections of Cloud Atlas, which stand well on their own. He doesn't do the whole genre switching thing here though, or not as blatantly (I’ve been on the fence about this question for the past few minutes—all the time that I spent thinking about what I should write before sitting down to write).

Through the end of the fourth section I was fairly sure that I’d give this five stars. It was just so good up until then.

If the book ended on page 400 it would have gotten five stars. It’s possible if the book ended with the penultimate section it would have gotten five stars, too. But instead it went on a bit too long for me and I ended up knocking off a star (later decided to be only a half star deduction) because the work as a whole I felt suffered from the last section.

If you haven’t read the book and ever plan to read it do not click the spoiler button. I mean it—don’t click spoiler and thank you for reading my review of The Bone Clocks!

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Seriously, don’t keep reading this if you haven’t read the book and plan to read it. I’m going to give away everything that happens!!!

Gripes.

The final section felt ‘weird�. The second to last section (using that fancy word to say that is just pretentious if you use it more than once in a review) is obviously the climax of the book. It’s told from the point of view of Marinus and the reader gets to discover many of the links that had been hinted at earlier in the book. Then there is the big battle scene, which is a little confusing to me but most big action scenes are and the section ends with Marinus and Hugo making a possible alliance to try to zap themselves out of the Blind Cather’s chapel. That’s fine, I liked it, I felt the battle was a little too D&D for me, and it bordered on what I’ve called Dungeon Master Bullshit at times, but that’s just the my reaction to magic type things and not a real criticism.

The comes the final section, which I was looking forward to because it was going to bring Holly back as the narrator, and I like when books come full circle, but it felt weird and preachy. It would be like in Star Wars the Death Star was blown up and then there was another twenty minutes of the characters preaching to you about some issues and then wrapping a loose end that you didn’t even really care all that much about.

It felt extra weird since this future world is mentioned by Esther, so at least one of them saw this quite possible future in store for humanity.

If only there were people in existence who could do things like completely rewire people’s brains to have them make better decisions about what to do with resources and who had millennia of experience to call upon to maybe try to help the world’s problems? Hmmmmm. There are, but instead of really working towards improving the world they are obsessed with this war with their ‘evil� counterparts.

Killing children is evil. We will all agree to that. Except maybe for people who like killing children and think they are righteous in their actions, but most people would agree that killing children in order to drink their souls and cheat mortality is probably evil.

The good horologists are at war with their evil counterparts because the evil ones kill four people (usually children) a year. The oldest member of this sect is maybe 600 years old, so in the lifetime of the sect say 2,400 people have been killed by these monsters.

Now in the future, say just on the day that Aoife dies, her’s and 200 other airplanes are cracked in half by a gigastorm. On the conservative side the average commercial airplane seats 200 (between two and five hundred according to the internets), that means that at least 40,000 people were killed that day from the effects of global warming, which it’s conceivable that since they can re-wire a schizophrenics brain then it would also be conceivable they could tweak the brains of key people who could have caused some lasting change.

Their war ends up sounding kind of stupid when you compare say the 80 more kids that would have died between the last two sections and the 40,000 that died in the plane crashes on one day, never mind the people dying of all the diseases and end of civilization shit that is going on. Those 80 kids are nice to save and all, but it is at the cost of a handful of the most powerful people to ever live. It would be like Superman and his buddies got themselves killed in order to save one classroom full of eight year olds (with no alternate universes to bring them back) while a meteor the size of the moon came bearing down Earth.

But those twenty kids lived! Eh, right?

2. This section is very accusatory of our gluttonous behaviors and maybe we need to be told to stop taking for granted all the wonderful things we have and see that there is a price we are going to have to pay eventually. It just felt kind of awkward being tacked on to the end here. As I said, it felt very preachy and it didn’t feel like it added much to the story. When the second to last section ended I knew that Holly lived and I figured she would probably eventually die as all people do. And Aoife and her husband would one day die, too. I didn’t need to know when. I guess since it’s in a way Holly’s story seeing how her life ultimately ends would have been nice, but not necessary since it’s not like we saw her before she was a know-it-all fifteen year old punk.

And we don’t see how she dies.

Or what happened to Hugo Lamb.

Or what exactly the script that Crispin Hershey should have been a part of but because he never read the poetry books he squandered, and maybe what side his killer had been on in the ‘war�.

After the big climax I just wasn’t ready to get emotionally invested in some new characters and while it’s nice that Holly’s granddaughter gets whisked off to the paradise of Iceland I didn’t need to know that.

The last section was too much for me. Too much new plot but not enough space for there to be enough development for me to really get involved in it. Does that make sense? It was too much world building just to basically tell me that the world was in the shitter and Marinus is still looking out for people close to Holly.

And is Iceland really a haven? How long until the Chinese or Russians come and take over the small island and put it in the crapper with the rest of the world?

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Phew, I rambled a bunch there. I might have been a little harsh but it’s only because I loved the first parts of the book so much. What I didn’t like so much didn’t ruin it for me, but maybe made it a 4.5 instead of a 5 star book.
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