"A Man's Reach Should Exceed His Grasp...?"
“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.” Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author
“For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of.”
David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks: A Novel
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I hear voices. They originate from the outback in Australia, from a ski chalet in Switzerland, from a gritty bar in London, a room in Manhattan on whose walls hangs masterworks, the tiny tip of land jutting out from Ireland and a whole lot more. These voices come from the mouths of characters. They live in a world of fiction.
We are all inhabited by voices. David Mitchell knows this. We, bone clocks that we are, live within words, but we live for words too. In his novel The Bone Clocks, Mitchell takes us on an epic journey through voices. I use the word epic purposefully because Mitchell has epic intentions. The question is whether the world is in need of a new epic and if so, if this is one for the ages, or just our age or one that will not last beyond some brief fanfare and the help of his devoted fans.
I am not alone I invoking the epic tradition. James Wood, in his New Yorkerreview, gives the book an epic fail:
“I doubt that David Mitchell’s intention was to return the secular novel to theological allegory, but that is what “The Bone Clocks” does. Above all, his cosmology seems an unconscious fantasy of the author-god, reinstating the novelist as omniscient deity, controlling, prodding, shaping, ending, rigging. He has spoken of his novels as forming one “über-book,” in which themes and characters recur and overlap: an epic ambition. Battles involving men and gods are, indeed, the life-and-death-blood of the epic form. But didn’t the epic hand off to the novel, in the last book of “Paradise Lost,” when the Angel Michael tells Adam and Eve that, though they will lose actual Paradise, they will possess “a Paradise within thee, happier far”? The novel takes over from the epic not just because inwardness opens itself up as the great novelistic subject but because human freedom asserts itself against divine arrangement. The “human case” refuses to be preordained. The history of the novel can, in fact, be seen as a secular triumph over providential theology: first, God is displaced; then the God-like author fills the theological void; then the God-like author is finally displaced, too. Despite Mitchell’s humane gifts as a secular storyteller, “The Bone Clocks” enforces an ordained hermeticism, in which fictional characters, often bearing names from previous Mitchell fictions, perform unmotivated maneuvers at the behest of mysterious plotters who can do what they want with their victims. Time to redact this particular Script.”
Wood is one of our greatest living book critics, but I think that while he is right about the epic ambitions of the book, I believe that he is wrong about calling for a redaction. Let me see if I can justify the ways of Mitchell to you, dear readers.
The Bone Clocks, like Cloud Atlas, takes us, across times, places and a group of characters whose lives intersect. The six sections unfold sequentially starting in 1984 (clearly picked as an homage to Orwell) and ending in 2043.1 Through the voices of six first person narrators we follow the unfolding life and times of Holly Sykes.
Holly does not appear, at first, to be a good candidate for an epic hero. At 15 she’s a precocious, foul-mouthed kid who thinks she’s in love. It doesn’t take long for her to learn that love and the world, as we know it is not as it seems. There is strong disagreement on whether Holly’s a character that rises to the level literary admiration. Michiko Tatukani thinks so: “as the most memorable and affecting character Mr. Mitchell has yet created “. Wood does not: “He uses first-person narration to seat himself in a comfy, rather bloke-ish realism; his characters, whether fifteen-year-old girls or middle-aged male English novelists, sound too alike, because they are all involved in a figurative exaggeration that is at first amusing but which becomes tiresome and coarse.”
From this perspective, the novel is a part of the genre of domestic novels that have earned their tears from readers. That much is accurate but it doesn’t go nearly far enough to cover the way that Mitchell structures and creates his work: “An epic battle between good and evil,” Mitchell says, making fun of himself in a coming-this-fall-to-theaters-everywhere voice.” Mitchell is smart enough to know that coming out straight faced with his epic ambitions would not go over well. As many writers know, (Socrates, Shakespeare Freud and Zizek, more than most), jokes are serious business. So is Mitchell’s attempt to incorporate many of the epic traditions and tropes into his work.
Homer’s words served at "the tale of the tribe" (Mallarme’s phrase) for hundreds of years in Greece. They served as more than just stories stitched together from various storytellers. They were the guideposts for how to live. I won’t go into any detail but The Iliad’s focus distills pretty well into: an exegesis of the wrath of Achilles. This hero is a role model in the way perhaps Ray Rice is a role model. He is astonishingly adept at a particular skill, but not much of an ethical soul. Achilles is obsessed with kleos, the fame that will come to a hero whose tales will be told for time immemorial. He sulks in his tent as other Greeks perish, desecrates the body of the real moral hero, Hector, and knowingly chooses short life of category shattering fighting ability in Troy, over a long quiet life lived in Greece.
Achilles kills Penthesileia
One character, a writer named Crispin Hershey, is obsessed with fame too. He obsesses over his place in the literary pantheon and even his first person narrative addresses itself to a “dear reader”, as though every thought he has passes through the consciousness that his thoughts are some form of literature. He has no access to people or even his own mind except as audience so single minded is his hope to be an immortal write, The character, as other reviews have pointed out, is a mix of Martin Amis and Mitchell himself. Many of the central characters in Mitchell’s book either question mortality or seek immortality and if there is a summary of what Mitchell's project attempts this is it: “The Bone Clocks is my think tank, staffed by myself, where I mull over the increasing presence of mortality.” Most of those who consciously seek immortality in the form of words or eternal youth through literally taking lives from others do not end well in his book. It remains to future critics to determine Mitchell’s fate of making it into the literary canon over the long term. Paradoxically, the characters who are the most heroic in terms of battling evil in combat, are also the ones who are to the public at large invisible, and the “invisible woman” invoked on the last page is the hero of the book. Mitchell seems at pains to praise the quiet heroes whose deeds go unsung rather than those who consciously seek kleos.
Homer, however, had another epic and to me there are traces of it throughoutThe Bone Clocks. Odysseus is defined in the first line of Homer’s poem as polytropos, which can be translated as many-minded. Mitchell has followed a path of creating characters from across times, places and backgrounds that it may be that the author is the many minded hero of the book. Odysseus uses his mind rather than his body to survive his many adventures on his attempt to return to Ithaca. The return home in a boat was a part of Cloud Atlas and the boats in The Bone Clocks take characters far more safely from place to place than any subsequent form of transportation. Characters are killed off in their cars and in planes, but boats and bicycles and waling seem to be the preferred mode of transport for the good characters.
Sheep's Head, Ireland
But the most important form of transport in the book is mental. In Mitchell’s fictional universe there are a select few, arrayed on two gnostic sides, who can access the minds and thoughts of another. They have the ability to change minds. I think Wood is right to invoke allegory here, as we are all inhabited by voices in ways that invoke spiritual salvation and damnation. Wood’s wonderful book, How Fiction Works, invokes the ghost of Roland Barthes as one of the great critics of writing.2 Barthes says any text as a tissue of quotations and this would include the text (and palimpsest) of the mind. It an ironic twist, the essay from which Barthes introduces this metaphor is called the “Death of the Author”. Mitchell undertakes what I would call a Zizekian inversion of Barthes’ thesis. Instead of the author disappearing behind the words, Mitchell brings his mediation on mortality to center stage, the stage of characters and words that echo and intersect and quote one another. But while he slyly places hints and winks and details from his other books in The Bone Clocks, it a not as overtly metafictional as it could be. Mitchell, through the mouth of the author/character Crispin Hershey, gives us a map to the genetic heritage of the book:
If you’re writing fiction or poetry in a European language, that pen in your hand was, once upon a time, a goose quill held by an Icelander. Like it or not, know it or not, it doesn’t matter. If you seek to represent the beauty, truth, and pain of the world in prose, if you seek to deepen character via dialogue and action, if you seek to unite the personal, the past, and the political in fiction, then you’re in pursuit of the same aims sought by the authors of the Icelandic sagas, right
here, seven, eight, nine hundred years ago. I assert that the author of Njal’s Saga deploys the very same narrative tricks used later by Dante and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Molière, Victor Hugo and Dickens, Halldór Laxness and Virginia Woolf, Alice Munro and Ewan Rice. What tricks? Psychological complexity, character development, the killer line to end a scene, villains blotched with virtue, heroic characters speckled with villainy, foreshadow and backflash, artful misdirection. Now, I’m not saying that writers in antiquity were ignorant of all of these tricks but,” here I put my balls and Auden’s on the block, “in the sagas of Iceland, for the first time in Western culture, we find proto-novelists at work. Half a millennium avant le parole, the sagas are the world’s first novels.
The importance of the Icelandic sagas as a starting point of the novel is something Woods overlooks in his review. It is not just the sagas that serve as inspiration. Iceland itself becomes the site of the book’s final Odyssean Nostos.
While I have invoked some epics and sagas as structural and thematic forebears to The Bone Clocks, Wood invokes the epic that is in many ways at the center of the book: Paradise Lost. But I think that Woods missed the boat (bad joke intended). When Wood writes: “I doubt that David Mitchell’s intention was to return the secular novel to theological allegory, but that is what “The Bone Clocks” does”, I think he gets it wrong. I think that Mitchell does intend to return us to allegory and the epic and the beginnings of the novel in the Icelandic sagas. Paradise Lost itself was for many an epic fail. For readers like Blake the good parts and best lines all belonged to Satan and many agree with him, including me. Heaven, as the Talking Heads, know is kind of a bore, but the bad guys have a dark cunning and knowledge that comes from rebelling against authority. The Bone Clocks undertakes a reversal. The truly evil characters in the book are largely stick figures, dark arts masters with little to say. The humans who have hurt others have more of the novelistic roundness and the human heroes have their flaws.
If there is doubt about my assertion I encourage readers to look at the cover of the book. There in the center is the apple, and that apple reappears throughout the book in different hands and plot lines, as an ingredient in cooking, as a prop for dark arts villain to chew and toss, but most importantly for Holly to grasp as she moves from one world to another. This last act takes place in what I consider to be thee weakest part of the book, section 5. It largely consists of science fiction exposition with all sorts of magical powers going on within a labyrinth about to come crashing down. It does not fit within the more human scale of the other sections, but it is there to invoke an epic structure and battle taking place around us of which we are unaware. If the book really is an allegory then this section depicts the battle going on in our heads rather than between ‘real’ forces of good and evil. Mitchell does not, however, have much to say about the Christian frame around which Paradise Lost centers. He leaves major religions out and instead creates his own cosmos. In part I think this is reticence on his part to alienate what he hopes will be a large audience of many faiths. Unlike Phillip Pullman, whose retelling of Paradise Lost in His Dark Materials trilogy reduces god to a dying old man who has no power and who has brought nothing good into the world.
Blake illustration for Paradise Lost
Mitchell seems to want to have it more than both ways. He wants his book to work on multiple levels, but it becomes to me at least, a battle of voices. He is writing more as a writer like Dickens than he is as Milton. By this I mean he wants to use language that invites readers in, he wants to tell good stories (and Wood gives him credit for this). Like Dickens, he tries to give voices to many who would be voiceless without his fiction. Ed Brubeck, the reporter who is addicted to war coverage tries to explain why he puts himself in danger: “If an atrocity isn’t written about, it stops existing when the last witnesses die. That’s what I can’t stand. If a mass shooting, a bomb, a whatever, is written about, then at least it’s made a tiny dent in the world’s memory. Someone, somewhere, some time, has a chance of learning what happened. And, just maybe, acting on it. Or not. But at least it’s there.”
Recurring characters in Mitchell's books
If Mitchell fails to cast a captivating spell over me me about the gnostic battle at the center of the plot, he does, nevertheless, convince me we are all inhabited by voices. Harold Bloom became famous when he showed how the agon of writers trying to outdo a previous epic poet is the battle that makes for some great art. The struggle with the voices of the past makes writers stretch boundaries and genres. I think this is, in part at least, the struggle of The Bone Clocks. It wants to be an epic, a saga, and a novel. Mitchell has given us well imagined characters, large themes and voices that attempt to tell, sometimes a bit too pointedly perhaps, the tale of the tribe, which in this day and age includes speakers the world over. The action takes place on every continent (except Antarctica) and we hear echoes and find apples and temptation in almost every place.
For some readers all these differing and at times contradictory approaches this might be over-reaching and I have to agree. I think Mitchell has tried to do too much within this one book.
But that is not to say he’s failed. The book fits into his vision of a much larger epic that includes his whole oevre. His plans for subsequent books are already in his head and if he succeeds in incorporating them within this huge frame, then this part of the saga may well be interpreted more benignly by future ages. Faulkner was satisfied with Yoknapawtapha County; Mitchell wants the four corners of the world.
Despite all I have written, I still have not addressed how Mitchell is rewriting the more recant epics of the Western tradition. Joyce, in Finnegan’s Wakehoped to incorporate all the voices of the world into a book that begins and ends with a flowing river. But to all but an enlightened few, the book is impenetrable. It fails because it really does attempt to rewrite writing. The same could be said of Pound's Cantos. The work of lifetime, Pound knew he had made a botch of it. Both Joyce and Pound display the Modernist elitism that kept them far from the average reader of fiction. They were not interested in them. Mitchell wants to reach as many as he can and in part that is a problem. For postmodernists there are plenty of things to find in the book. For sci fi/dystopian fans there are lots of things here to enjoy. For readers who want a lifelong bildungsroman that also works as a mutigenerational saga they will not be disappointed. Perhaps. It may be that there is not enough focus on one particular approach to satisfy the aficionados hoping for something less ambitious. I found the different tales of the main characters well plotted and well written. Even Wood applauds Mitchell’s story telling ability. The writing is not Flaubertian, but then I don’t think laboring over each word for a day to get "le mot juste" is what Mitchell hoped to accomplish. His sentences flow, sometimes rising to beauty; almost all are useful in a utilitarian sense.
If I sound a bit like Joseph Campbell’s thesis of a hero with a thousand faces it is not my main intention. The hero of the novel is Holly Sykes. She does achieve fame, also in the form of a book. She tells the story of her voices; those that came to her in childhood and that are more than just hallucinations. Voices speak to her and through her. In childhood she heard “radio voices”; after that, she had a vision of her younger brother in a tunnel, a place he could not be, yet is.3 She’s a part of the gnostic plot she knows almost nothing about until fairly far in the novel. She also undergoes an epic adventure under the ground, which is part labyrinth part Inferno. After that, however, she eschews fame and her heroic deeds are unknown except for a small band of “ invisible” guides.
The last section of the book ends with what has now become a common scenario among some of the luminaries writing novels: apocalypse. The world we know today has largely disappeared. Any technology, from the Internet, planes, electricity and most other modern creature comforts are fast disappearing (read Cloud Atlas for more on how this has happened). We are left with what I would say in a last epic invocation: Eliot’s The Wasteland(Mitchell does quote Eliot in the novel). The original title of that poem, He Do The Police in Different Voices seems apt for this novel. The voices still echo and some resurface and there is even a glimmer of hope (not quite as Vedic as Eliot’s Shanti Shanti Shanti, but nevertheless connected to these same sources). We are left with a portrait of a heroic old woman fighting to keep her family alive. I would even say that he takes us to what Wood asks a novel to do, which is to create "a paradise within happier far" even while the world without falls into fragments. I found the ending novelistically satisfying and I look forward to the next installment of what may be the first truly global epic.
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I hear voices. They speak to me from all over the globe. They write to me or post things on my pages. They tell me things I did not know, the stories of their lives. They share disasters-- losing a plastic sheet, the only protection they had, in a refugee camp in Nepal, while others share triumphs-- beating the English Royals on a polo field outside London. They talk about growing up with a single mother working multiple jobs to keep the children fed and educated and they speak to me of being selected by a government to come to the US to get an education and take a place of leadership in a business. They talk of being the only female learning from a Master in the oldest monastery in China and of being the only the only undergraduate picked for a job with Julian Robertson and his hedge fund in New York. These stories are true. I talk to many people from around the world each day and so it may be that I respond the way I do to Mitchell because his voices speak truly to me, even if only in fiction.
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"Like all storytelling mammals, Naoki is anticipating his audience’s emotions and manipulating them. That is empathy." David Mitchell in his introduction to The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism
“Even for extraordinarily lucky people, life is difficult. And when we look at what makes it so, we see that we are all prisoners of our thoughts.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
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[1] I have two guesses about why Mitchell picked this year. UN resolution 2043: The resolution resulted in the setting up of the United Nations Supervision Mission in Syria to observe the implementation of the Kofi Annan peace plan for Syria on the Syrian Civil War.One main character in the novel dies in the Syrian conflict . And it is also the year in which whites in the US will no longer comprise the majority of the population. The mixing of races s an important part of the subtext of the book.
[2] Wood’s How Fiction Works Is brilliant, but he gives pride of place to writers who employ what he calls “free indirect style” as the most literary approach to writing .
[3]While many critics have traced the links and lineages characters from this book to Mitchell’s previous work, I have yet to see anyone comment on how a book and his introduction to it help serves as a guide to the novel. Mitchell has called the book one of the best he’s read and I think he in on to something. The memoir of a 13-year-old autistic boy shows us how many voices and how beautiful words live inside an autistic boy. (Mitchell’s son is also autistic) In his introduction to the book Mitchell refers to radio voices in ways that connect to his novel:
The chances are that you never knew this mind-editor existed, but now that he or she has gone, you realize too late how the editor allowed your mind to function for all these years. A dam-burst of ideas, memories, impulses and thoughts is cascading over you, unstoppably. Your editor controlled this flow, diverting the vast majority away, and recommending just a tiny number for your conscious consideration. But now you’re on your own.
Now your mind is a room where twenty radios, all tuned to different stations, are blaring out voices and music..
Higashida, Naoki. The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism
Holly’s radio people make her famous. The words she hears are not overwhelming but still need to be quelled. Her brother, Jacko, listens to different voices on the radio. The Chinese stations he’s tuned in hint that he’s more than the flesh and blood 8-year-old kid he is. So too for other characters who are inhabited by voices or have the luck or curse of being visited by beings who can prove to be a kind or damning ‘editor’ cutting out memories or speaking in comforting tones through telepathy.
Finally, the book is also homage to music. The Talking Heads gets pride of place in part because of their name and its applicability to the plot, but their lyrics speak to the characters’ lives and comment on the novel’s plot too:
“Everyone is trying to get to the bar.
The name of the bar, the bar is called Heaven.
The band in Heaven plays my favorite song.
They play it once again, they play it all night long.
Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.
Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”
Talking Heads, Heaven
I hope someone will gather all the songs invoked or quoted in the book and post them on a Spotify playlist.
