He has a contemptible strategy for enriching himself at the expense of a helpless old man, and his Swiss bank account grows in parallel with the number of friends he stitches up to lose at cards.
Instead we witness Hugo, untroubled by any moral scruples, constructing success from a middle-class background. Like Holly he has inexplicable flashes of precognition and he experiences things that make no sense but it’s too soon for the reader to ‘join the dots’. In 1991 the narrator is Hugo Lamb, a Hooray Henry who hangs around with other Cambridge undergraduates and beds women carelessly.
She also meets a friendly couple who give her a bed for the night, but they get killed.Ī lot of people get mysteriously killed, and one of them is probably Holly’s little brother Jason who goes missing at this time. On her way to what seems like a bleak future, she meets some helpful people, including a nice young man called Brendan who tells her about a fruit picking summer job he’d had during a university break. She’d stayed out overnight with her boyfriend, been given hell about that by her mother, and then ‘left home’ to make a new life with the boyfriend - who she finds in bed with her best friend. The Bone Clocks is the story of a succession of people from 1984 to 2043, all of them linked in some way to Holly Sykes, a 15-year old who storms out of the house in 1984 after a row with her mother and a double-betrayal.
(Just like the ending of Star Wars, the original, which saw Darth Vader vanquished but not destroyed.) Like Cloud Atlas, this novel is more, much more than the sum of its parts. Structured around several narratives, The Bone Clocks features the eternal existential battle between good and evil, and, as it should, it has an ending that leaves open the possibility that matters are not resolved. Which has a companion I now just have to read too, it’s called Slade House (2015)… and I’ve reserved it at the library so I’ll probably read that before I read Utopia Avenue. David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue (2020) has just been nominated for the Dublin Literary Award (and, yessss, it’s on my TBR), and by coincidence I’ve just finished reading The Bone Clocks.
0 kommentar(er)
