white_hart (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
white_hart) wrote2016-01-30 07:07 pm
white_hart) wrote2016-01-30 07:07 pm
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Reading: The Bone Clocks
I am slightly undecided about David Mitchell (the novelist, not the comedian)'s books. I read Ghostwritten about ten years ago and loved it, bounced of number9dream hard, ground to a halt in the middle of Cloud Atlas, liked Black Swan Green very much indeed and never got round to buying The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. But my parents gave me Slade House for Christmas and said "you really need to have read The Bone Clocks first, so I bought The Bone Clocks and have just finished it.
The short verdict is, I enjoyed it. Mostly.
The long verdict is that yes, I mostly enjoyed it, but there were points where I really wasn't enjoying it and if I was still reading a book a month rather than at least one book most weeks I suspect I'd have ground to a halt just as I did with Cloud Atlas, and for much the same reasons; Mitchell's trademark structure of something which seems more like a collection of loosely linked short stories than a novel, with different narrators and generally riffing off different genres, meant that after an opening section which was a perfect pastiche of the kind of YA fantasy I grew up on (it reminded me most of Mary Gentle's A Hawk in Silver, because of the southern England seaside in summer setting and because both have central characters called Holly, and perhaps also because both felt darker and nastier than YA fantasy tended to be, back then) I got dragged off into the narrative of an overprivileged and incredibly unpleasant Cambridge undergraduate, followed by a war correspondent describing the horrors of Iraq in 2004 rather more vividly than I prefer to read for entertainment. When the fourth section turned out to be a lampooning of literary society narrated by a self-important, petty and vindictive novelist and the fantasy promise of the first section seemed to have dwindled to nothing but hints, if I hadn't been fairly sure I could get through that chunk in a day I think I would have given up. (It was the section with the horrible publisher that I couldn't get past in Cloud Atlas, too. Apparently lampooning of literary society leaves me cold.)
However, I persevered, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Mitchell managed to make the self-important, petty and vindictive novelist seem almost sympathetic by the end. And then the next section picked up the fantasy plot again, though more in the vein of a SyFy Channel miniseries than the 80s YA fantasy of the first part, and there was peril and double-crossing and good versus evil and it was all rather fun.
The final section felt like something of a coda after the fantasy plot had been mostly resolved, and it also turned out to be the kind of near-future dystopia that gives me nightmares; post-oil, post-environmental catastrophe, collapse of civilisation kind of thing. I do not enjoy reading things like this; it's all too plausibly horrible and terrifies me as much as nuclear war did when I was a teenager. Mitchell writes beautifully, and even managed to pull a vaguely hopeful ending out of somewhere, but it was a tough read.
So yes, I mostly enjoyed the book. It was well-written, and had engaging and complex characters and an intruiging and twisty plot. But I also feel rather as though I've been bait-and-switched by a book that started off as one of my favourite genres and ended as one of my least favourite.
The short verdict is, I enjoyed it. Mostly.
The long verdict is that yes, I mostly enjoyed it, but there were points where I really wasn't enjoying it and if I was still reading a book a month rather than at least one book most weeks I suspect I'd have ground to a halt just as I did with Cloud Atlas, and for much the same reasons; Mitchell's trademark structure of something which seems more like a collection of loosely linked short stories than a novel, with different narrators and generally riffing off different genres, meant that after an opening section which was a perfect pastiche of the kind of YA fantasy I grew up on (it reminded me most of Mary Gentle's A Hawk in Silver, because of the southern England seaside in summer setting and because both have central characters called Holly, and perhaps also because both felt darker and nastier than YA fantasy tended to be, back then) I got dragged off into the narrative of an overprivileged and incredibly unpleasant Cambridge undergraduate, followed by a war correspondent describing the horrors of Iraq in 2004 rather more vividly than I prefer to read for entertainment. When the fourth section turned out to be a lampooning of literary society narrated by a self-important, petty and vindictive novelist and the fantasy promise of the first section seemed to have dwindled to nothing but hints, if I hadn't been fairly sure I could get through that chunk in a day I think I would have given up. (It was the section with the horrible publisher that I couldn't get past in Cloud Atlas, too. Apparently lampooning of literary society leaves me cold.)
However, I persevered, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Mitchell managed to make the self-important, petty and vindictive novelist seem almost sympathetic by the end. And then the next section picked up the fantasy plot again, though more in the vein of a SyFy Channel miniseries than the 80s YA fantasy of the first part, and there was peril and double-crossing and good versus evil and it was all rather fun.
The final section felt like something of a coda after the fantasy plot had been mostly resolved, and it also turned out to be the kind of near-future dystopia that gives me nightmares; post-oil, post-environmental catastrophe, collapse of civilisation kind of thing. I do not enjoy reading things like this; it's all too plausibly horrible and terrifies me as much as nuclear war did when I was a teenager. Mitchell writes beautifully, and even managed to pull a vaguely hopeful ending out of somewhere, but it was a tough read.
So yes, I mostly enjoyed the book. It was well-written, and had engaging and complex characters and an intruiging and twisty plot. But I also feel rather as though I've been bait-and-switched by a book that started off as one of my favourite genres and ended as one of my least favourite.