On its surface, David Mitchell’s “The Bone Clocks,” the sprawling and unclassifiable new novel by the author of the best-selling “Cloud Atlas” (2004), is a page-turning, time-traveling sci-fi yarn designed to appeal to the “Dr. Who” set. It centers on Holly Sykes, a teenage runaway who finds herself caught in the crossfire of an invisible war between rival mystics, and Hugo Lamb, an entitled Cambridge student who enters into a Faustian bargain to keep his youth in exchange for something he should never have considered doing without. The story zigzags among places and times, from a small English village in the mid-1980s to the Swiss Alps during the Middle Ages to a Manhattan townhouse in the not-too-distant future.
Just underneath all this glittering hubbub, as Mitchell’s readers have come to expect, is an ambitious meditation on mortality and survival. The English author’s most loyal fans will also recognize that many of the characters and plot threads have been carried over from his previous novels, two of which (“Cloud Atlas” and 2001’s “number9dream”) were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the United Kingdom’s highest literary honor.
Printers Row Journal recently caught up with Mitchell for a telephone interview from his home in the village of Clonakilty, Ireland, where he lives with his wife and two children. Here’s an edited transcript of our chat.
Q: You said in a recent New York Times article that the impetus for your writing “The Bone Clocks” was your “impending midlife crisis,” but this intriguing topic was not explored. Did you mean it as a joke?
A: Many a true word is spoken in jest, of course. I’m 45, and my mortality is no longer abstract, over the horizon. It’s there when I look in the mirror, it’s in my knees when I have to take the stairs instead of the escalator. So yeah. As you move through stages in your life, it is not morbid to forge a working accommodation with mortality and establish a relationship with it, rather than put your hands over your ears and shut your eyes and sing a song that goes something like, “I can’t hear you.”
Q: And this feeling informs “The Bone Clocks,” does it?
A: Yes, I think so. The book is a kind of thought experiment revolving around death. Hugo Lamb is given the option of a Faustian pact to not have to give up his youth and his beauty and his health, but rather to keep these things, in return for the amputation of his conscience. And I think that’s a bargain that a lot of us would at least stop and think about. We wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand — at least I wouldn’t. I’d like to think I’d make the right choice, and view mortality as a sort of companion that reminds you not to waste time and maximize what life has to offer, but I would be tempted.
Q: You’re known for a lot of experimentation in your novels, and I wonder whether this feeling of mortality — of time growing short — maybe underlines that you must take all the risks you want to take. Maybe you don’t want to wake up 20 years from now and realize that you played it safe.
A: Wow. That’s quite a profound remark on a rainy Irish night. (Laughs.) It reminds me of what (Italo) Calvino said about (Laurence Sterne’s) “Tristram Shandy,” actually. He called it an evasion of death, a denial of time, by Tristram hiding in digression, and if only he can make the digressions and circumlocutions complex enough, then the end will never find him. He’ll never get to the end, he’ll cheat mortality. It’s a theoretical idea, of course, but quite beautiful. What you said is quite beautiful, too, maybe more than its subject deserves. (Laughs.) You know, my books can look a bit atypical and oddball, and maybe they are, but that’s not really my goal. It’s just that to write the books I have to write, they have to have that experimental structure. There is no other structure. If there was a simpler, more conventional structure, believe me, I’d go for it. But those aren’t the books that my sort of cerebral adrenaline gland goes “whoosh” at the prospect of writing.
Q: Beyond your books’ experimentation, of course, there’s their large ambition, which is the other word attached to them most frequently. I don’t know if this is an expression you use in Europe, but you bite off a lot.
A: We do say that, and it’s usually in the context of biting off more than you can chew. (Laughs.) First of all, I don’t want to write books that I can easily write, because they would not be nourishing for me to write, and I don’t think I’d learn much from doing that. Secondly, I don’t want people to order me from their bookshop and receive a book that’s like other books they’ve already read in that bookshop. Thirdly — and this ties in with your previous question — you’re right, I am motivated by an aversion to future regret.
I take my time with books. I’m not that prolific — it’s every World Cup, at best, when I get a new book out. I would like to speed up a bit, but I’m not sure how plausible that is. That means, barring an unwelcome diagnosis or an accident, that I’m probably halfway. I’ve published six books, and at the speed I’m writing, I may get to 12, or I may not. I know what the next four are, and I don’t want one of those books to be something where I’m not stretched or learning something or trying to figure out new ways to do something I haven’t done before.
Q: You know what your next four books are?
A: It’s probably five, but let’s call it four. Yeah, I do.
Q: What do you know about these books — their titles? Their storylines?
A: In some cases their titles. In some cases, destinations on the itineraries that those books will take. Before I write it, I think of a book as a road journey, and I know it will start in Town A, and it will go through Valley F, and around Lake L, and through Wood W. But I don’t know what lies between those points, and I don’t know how to get around Lake L until I get to Town B, or whatever. It’s a loose, flexible road journey. So with my future books I know certain stations, certain scenes, scenarios, characters, structural ideas, milieus that parts of the novel will take place in, dramatic confrontational moments, set pieces and so on.
Q: That’s extraordinary. I talk to novelists all the time, and none of them has ever said he knows what the next four or five books are going to be.
A: It bothers me a bit. I get ideas for novels fairly often, and it’s a cause of concern that just because I’ve got these four locked in the queue — in a holding pattern, like airplanes above an airport — that will therefore preclude future ones. It also sounds like a lot, and I do want to make a go at them before mortality is breathing down my neck even more hotly than it’s doing now.
Q: George R.R. Martin, the author of the “Game of Thrones” series, would sympathize with you. He’s 65 years old and has projected the series as seven books, of which five have been completed. And his fans go online and castigate him for writing too slowly. The HBO series is going to catch up with the novels, they’re saying, and won’t that be a disaster? That’s pressure.
A: The poor guy can’t win, can he? These adored books aren’t good enough for people — he has to write these adored books even faster. Well, let people wait. We get things on demand far too easily, and we think it’s just a matter of having the money, and then you get what you want. No, you have to wait until Mr. Martin is good and ready.
Q: I’m guessing that your foreknowledge of what’s coming in future books has to do with the fact that your novels are related. You have shared characters and, to some extent, shared storylines that flow from one book to the next. If that were not the case, perhaps you wouldn’t know quite as much as you do about what’s coming.
A: It could be. This has evolved over time, of course. The first three books, I did it more or less because it amused me. As time went by, I saw worthier artistic reasons for doing it. And now I’m sort of seduced by the possible magnitude of what I’m now officially calling the überbook. (Laughs.) It does mean that each of the books is more of a chapter in the larger project. What’s always been the case, and what always will be the case, is that you will be able to read each one individually, in and of its own terms. I’m not doing sequels. It’s not a cycle, it’s not a “Game of Thrones”-type series. It’s just that if you have read the others, then there will be more echoes and resonances and feelings of shared history with a character you knew in a previous incarnation or phases of the character’s life.
Q: You say in the Times article, I guess jokingly, that the reason for this interlinking business is that you’re “megalomaniacal.”
A: It’s only half a joke. Maybe artistically it’s not. I haven’t read the Times article, and probably won’t — the words of others about yourself, even complimentary ones, are the wasp at the picnic of the calm mind, and you’re better off without them — but artistically, I think I am megalomaniacal. Even my embryonic novels were large: large-scale maps of imaginary archipelagos like Ursula Le Guin’s, or continents of Tolkien’s. Over half-term holidays, my parents would shut me up by giving me a large piece of paper on one of their drawing boards, and that would be my half-term’s entertainment. I would draw minutely detailed pictures of places that didn’t exist, and I loved doing that. And I think that’s never quite left me.
Q: Do you think of yourself now as a science fiction writer, as opposed to a literary writer? Those categories seem to mean less and less as time goes on, and yet they do remain relevant to some people, at least in the United States. There are people who still think it’s a scandal that literary awards are given to Stephen King, for example. Anyhow, I’m guessing you haven’t lost much sleep over this topic.
A: Yes, you’ve anticipated my answer. The biggest question I’m always facing is, How can I make this book work? The question of whether I fit into this or that pantheon, it just isn’t healthy. I’ve got four books to write, so I haven’t got time to think about these things, really.
But I do think it’s a shame to preclude writers like Stephen King just on the basis of the fact that some people call him a genre writer. If you’re not going to read them, please come up with a more intelligent reason for not reading them than that. That’s a readerly version of harming oneself, I feel. That’s not to say it’s immoral to not like Stephen King, if you’ve read him and he’s honestly not your cup of tea. That’s fine. But don’t not read him because some people call him a genre writer.
How quickly we forget that so many of the world’s classics have DNA that comes straight from genre. What about “Brave New World,” the most subtle and unsettling dystopia there is? Or “1984”? Or much of Margaret Atwood’s output? Or Edgar Allan Poe? E.M. Forster wrote a science fiction novella, called “The Machine Stops,” and it’s really good. How come it’s OK for them to do it, but not Stephen King or Neil Gaiman or Ursula Le Guin?
It goes back to that great quote of Duke Ellington’s. He was asked, “What is good jazz?” And Ellington is said to have looked over his shoulder rather insouciantly and said, “If it sounds good, it is good.”
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Follow him on Twitter @KevinNance1.
“The Bone Clocks”
By David Mitchell, Random House, 631 pages, $30
