Exciting and frustrating in equal measure

Summer 1984. Holly Sykes, an English runaway teen, meets a strange old woman who asked him asylum - and accepts without understanding what it commits. From that day, she witnessed violent and inexplicable events which she did not always remember, and prone to precognition flashes that resemble seizures. Despite herself, Holly has become a pawn of paramount importance in the war being waged on the margins of human society, and Horologistes Anchorites: two quasi-immortals groups opposed to the origins and objectives ...

Difficult to talk about this abundant novel without spoiling the many surprises it holds. "The bone clocks" consists of six sections each focus on a different narrator in a different era. After Holly Sykes - the red thread in the history - in 1984, we follow Hugo Lamb, devoid of conscience student will briefly his lover, in 1991 and Ed Brubeck, war reporter addicted to adrenaline who she had a daughter in 2004, and Crispin Hershey, arrogant and cowardly writer who nevertheless became his friend, between 2015 and 2020, and Dr. Iris Fenby who has already treated twice and under two different identities, while in 2025 that is preparing the final confrontation between Horologistes and Anchorites and again Holly Sykes in 2043 in a world ravaged by natural resource scarcity and nuclear accidents.

On the positive side, David Mitchell knows how to give a very personal voice to each of its narrators (sometimes you even feel it engages in an exercise of style in order to impress the reader by proving the extent of his writing registry). Despite cleavage a little cartoonish and altogether questionable, both factions of immortals are very interesting in its own way. And throughout the almost 600 pages of his novel, I was impatient to discover the rest of the story. On the negative side, he spends too much time on things of no interest to the main plot (the part of Ed, for example, is absolutely worthless ...) at the expense of he could devote to develop history, personality and powers of Horologistes. And above all, its end is an absolute darkness, so desperate that soon closed the book, I was taken with a violent urge to throw him down to trampling wildly. In the end, I found "The bone clocks" exciting despite its flaws, but if I was the editor of David Mitchell, I guarantee he suffered serious alterations before publication!