He writes with such luminous clarity and pitch-perfect voice he can basically lead a reader anywhere he wishes. The deeper one reads into “The Bone Clocks,” the easier it becomes to sustain the disbelief required to find out how Mitchell will tie the still shadowy world together with the more realistic one. Hugo takes the bait and walks out on a life of risk and possible domestic bliss. He has to make a choice, a Faustian bargain: Stay with her and the world of consequences or follow this cadre of undead to the underworld where he can be granted the ability to live forever. His charade comes apart over a hideous skiing weekend in the Swiss Alps, where he encounters none other than Holly Sykes, burying her guilt over her brother’s unsolved disappearance in copious amounts of work.Īfter a long weekend spent in bed with Holly, Hugo is visited by the very same immortal figures who had visited Holly over a decade ago. Leaping forward in time in the next section, we meet a scholarship student named Hugo in 1991 Oxbridge trying to con his classmates into believing he is one of them. They are like tiny glimpses of an order to the universe, hidden beneath the surface. In “The Bone Clocks,” these breaks in reality operate differently. It made his hero seem as roomy and complex as young men feel. That book was centered on one character, so its imaginative wanderings served an expansive purpose. On its first occasion, Mitchell’s rupture of realism’s patina feels jarring, as kitschy as when UFOs swoop down on Harrison Ford in “Cowboys & Aliens.” He has used this strategy before, of parallel narratives, too, most successfully in his second novel, “Number9dream,” in which a boy’s search for his father in modern-day Tokyo swooped in and out of gorgeously described daydreams. Nearing the end of her runaway scheme, she also learns that her brother has gone missing.

Demons with gnomic messages speak to her a creepy assassin tracks her down. Once hospitalized for hallucinations, Holly’s road to bumming for work is visited by spectral visions of a dangerous netherworld. Thus begins Holly’s larger odyssey, away from safety and into the arms of the world and its chaos, which in her case, contains startling rips in the fabric of reality.

The bone clocks book