The Bone Clocks revolves around the struggle between two groups of competing immortals, the Horologists and the Anchorites, each with their own magical powers. Yet most of the book revolves around live and loves of a series of “normal” people. The Bone Clocks iterates through a series of episodes widely separated by time and place.

As the book opens, teenage Holly Sykes is experiencing a typical teenage angst caused by her mother’s disapproval of her twenty-something older boyfriend. She runs away from home to be with him. When the not-unexpected occurs, she’s set adrift, running away to a farm on the Isle of Sheppey north of London. Adventures, magical and otherwise, follow.

Hugo Lamb is a magnetic and attractive college student in Cambridge, engaged in riotous living and a few quasi-ethical shenanigans. The pretentiousness (and fun!) of college is well captured by Mitchell. Witness the synopsis of Hugo’s friend Richard’s book:

My hero is a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman, working on a novel about a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman, working on a novel about a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman. No one’s ever tried anything like it.

Mitchell’s descriptive prose talent is considerable. Here’s the background chatter at the Buried Bishop bar where Hugo and his pals are drinking:

The Buried Bishop’s a gridlocked scrum, an all-you-can-eat of youth: “Stephen Hawking and the Dalai Lama, right; they posit a unified truth”; short denim skirts, Gap and Next shirts, Kurt Cobain cardigans, black Levi’s; “Did you see that oversexed pig by the loo, undressing me with his eyes?”; that song by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl booms in my diaphragm and knees; “Like, my only charity shop bargains were headlice, scabies, and fleas”; a fug of hairspray, sweat and Lynx, Chanel No. 5, and smoke; well-tended teeth with zero fillings, revealed by the so-so joke – “Have you heard the news about Schrodinger’s Cat? It died today; wait—it didn’t, did, didn’t, did …”; high-volume discourse on who’s the best Bond; on Gilmour and Waters and Syd; on hyperreality; dollar-pound parity; Sartre, Bart Simpson, Barthes’s myths; “Make mine a double”; George Michael’s stubble; ………..

Or, describing a battle between the Horologists and Anchorites:

Think of those tennis-ball firing machines, but loaded with hand grenades,” offers Oshima, “trapped in a shipping container, on a ship caught in a force-ten gale.

Eventually, Holly will run into Hugo in Switzerland, and the sparks fly….as they become closer and closer, Hugo is recruited into a mysterious enterprise by beautiful woman. It becomes increasingly clear Hugo is utterly amoral….but I don’t want to spoil anything…

When the dust settles, we encounter Crispin Hersey, a semi-washed up celebrity writer. Crispin will become a lifelong friend to Holly, and Mitchell’s skewering of the pretentious literary scene as they get to know each other is hilarious. Mitchell renders Crispin (and Holly and Hugo and the other characters) extraordinarily well – they’re all real, flawed, admirable, 3d characters.

Music is a running thread throughout The Bone Clocks, from Britten to club music to Shostakovich. (For fun, I made a Spotify playlist of the music mentioned, here). One song mentioned twice, I could not find anything out about. If you know anything about Exocets for Breakfast by Damon MacNish, let me know – I expect it’s made up.

The skirmishes between the immortals culminate in a final apocalyptic battle….when the dust clears we are into the last segment. It’s not a spoiler to say that Holly Sykes is old and still alive and living in ??? Ireland…???

This is where I found the book really went off the rails for me. After the last battle, the book felt nearly done. But then, the last chapter is 80 pages of non-sequitur. Holly is old and taking care of some young children, whom I’ll not identify for spoiler reasons. But if Flashback by Dan Simmons is a fever-dream of a potential bad future created by Obama, as imagined by the current right wing in the US, the last chapter of The Bone Clocks is a cornucopia of conventional modern liberalism’s bogeymen. There’s little power, little internet, nuclear accidents, religious narrow-mindedness, ice caps melting, and more:

It’s grief for ….the ice caps we melted, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked,..the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, …the oil we squandered….all so we didn’t have to change our cozy lifestyles..

or this, from Holly and Mo’s encounter with a looter thug:

“So you’re bringing back the law of the jungle?”, asks Mo.
“You were bringing it back, every time you filled your tank”.

On and on for 80 pages – I felt like I was being hectored by The Huffington Post and MSNBC…kinda tiresome, and really not much connected to anything else in the book, more of a closing homily.

I really enjoyed The Bone Clocks. The characters were great fun and I cared about them, and they went so many interesting places. The book could have been 2/3 the length, and lost the last episode, and I would have been much the happier for it. But still, a great read.

(I received a copy of The Bone Clocks through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program)

The Conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I can’t read this without hearing the voice of Ciaran Hinds (who played Caesar on the tv series Rome) narrating this…..(oh and for you Rome fans, I ran across this line in the book: “Among the non-commissioned officers of this legion were two men named T. Pullo and L. Vorenus..”)

Although undoubtedly Caesar was writing for both then-current political consumption as well as perhaps for posterity, this is a surprisingly frank and detailed account of the 10 years it took Caesar to conquer Gaul (France, Belgium and parts of Germany, Switzerland and Italy). He details both the valor of the Gauls (his enemy) and well as periodic stupidity or cowardice of certain Romans, as well as the to-be-expected accounts of heroism on the part of Romans. His language is strikingly modest and he is constantly naming soldiers of the line and giving credit to others. While again this is partly undoubtedly to encourage political support and loyalty, one can’t but believe that Caesar had internalized a leadership style that gave credit to others (whilst undoubtedly seeing the benefit to himself thereby). His account of the cultural practices of the Druids is quite interesting and it’s clear that Caesar was a student of the people he hoped to conquer. It’s interesting to read quotes such as this – “Next to him (Mars the god) come Apollo, Jupiter, and Minerva, and about them their ideas correspond fairly closely with those current among the rest of mankind, viz. that Apollo expels diseases, that Minerva teaches ….” and speculate on Caesar’s own perspective on the gods their potential uses for political purposes.

A common practice of the time to encourage compliance after a victory was the taking of hostages. One can’t go more than a few pages without more hostages being taken, often in the hundreds. Indeed later in the book we find that there is almost an entire city dedicating to housing the hostages taken in the war.

We see in the text that Caesar was always mindful of appearance and ceremony. For example, “Caesar was nevertheless strongly of the opinion that to do so by means of boats would neither be unattended by risk, nor worth of his own or his country’s dignity.” And surprisingly matter-of-fact about the business of war: “It remained, therefore, only to do the work of devastation, and for this a few days were spent in burning the farms and villages and in rooting up the crops”. (It is striking how much of the conquest is dictated by weather and seasons – Caesar often retires to Rome for the winter, for example). There is surprising amount of engineering in warfare here – there are many accounts of interesting bridge-building techniques and challenges.

The Conquest of Gaul culminates in the battle of Alesia where the Gaul King Vercingetorix surrenders to Caesar after a prolonged siege and battle. (The description of the innovations Caesar and his army made in fortifications are quite interesting.). Interestingly enough there is little description of Vercingetorix’s fate in the book (nor much celebration of what would prove the final victory for Caesar), but he would be sent to Rome, kept a prisoner for 5 years, and executed during Caesar’s triumph, but that time period is not covered by the book.

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