The Bone Clocks is David Mitchell’s Mid-Life Crisis Novel

All of the characters in David Mitchell’s ingenious, interlocking new novel The Bone Clocks are striving for immortality, be it figurative (frustrated British writer and former “wild child of letters” Crispin Hershey, who hopes his work will outlive him), or entirely literal (but here there be spoilers). It’s not only a fear of death—the entire novel seems preoccupied with the inevitable trauma of aging all of our bodies must undergo, from thinning hair and sagging flesh to aching joints and brittle bones.
Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet) isn’t coy about why. At a recent reading and Q&A at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, he told the audience that he considers this book his “mid-life crisis” novel, and what seems a rather fantastical story of a normal girl with a complicated destiny tied up in the fates of two warring groups of immortal psychics has a much more serious central thesis than you might expect. It’s right there in the title, a sneering reference to mortality: we are all bone clocks, “we will all fall prey to decrepitude and decay.” Our accumulated years are as readable on our faces as the hands of a clock.
A slim, trim 45, Mitchell nevertheless looks in the mirror these days and sees less of himself and more of his father. However long his journey on Earth ends up lasting, by this point it’s likely at least half over, and like his characters, there are times where he imagines he’d do almost anything to reverse the flow of years, or at least pause them for a little while.
Western culture is one that, if not in outright denial of death, prefers not to look at it. “That’s why we laugh so nervously at the many Woody Allen epigrams about death, like ‘It’s not that I’m scared of it, I just don’t want to be there when it happens,'” Mitchell said. “We have a youth- and beauty-obsessed culture. Some other cultures, maybe with more Confucian genes in the mix, where age is more venerated, are possibly better at giving us a healthier relationship with mortality, where it’s not this awful negation of everything that’s worthwhile in life, but more of a companion that walks along with us and says, ‘Oy, don’t waste time. don’t waste a beautiful day.'”
For Mitchell, the fantastical question at the heart of the novel is, really, “what would you be willing to pay for this not to apply to you? What would you do for a ‘get out of jail free card’ that would allow you to keep the looks you had, your youth, the great squanderable supply of time? Would you be willing to amputate your conscience?”
It’s a choice none of us will be given in quite so literal a fashion as the characters in The Bone Clocks, for some of whom living forever is not just a possibility but an inevitability (and a weight that may turn out to be greater than is bearable). But we do all face it in how we live our lives every day. Do we experience the full richnesses of life, or do we fritter away our time? Do we embrace risk and possibility, or do we live in sheltered, safe circumstances? Do we do everything to deny our mortality, or do we walk alongside it?
“It was a thoughtful question to compose to myself,” Mitchell said—would he betray his conscience to extend his own existence? “I like to think I would take the Taoist, Buddhist view, but I’m damned if I wouldn’t have to think about it before I did the decent thing.”
The Bone Clocks is available now in hardcover and NOOK.