Steve's Reviews > The Bone Clocks

Fans of Mitch Davies had high hopes for this one, but I think it’s fair to say that reactions have been mixed. Of course, with the critical success of Mapping Thunderheads and Davies’ reputation for inventive structuring, this long-awaited release was meant to solidify his status as a literary virtuoso. My own feeling is he fell short of the mark, though with strong work that at times brought him close. As I was tallying my pluses and minuses, I made the mistake of looking at the many excellent Goodreads reviews already out there and now realize that most of my thoughts have been covered by them. I should have just left it at that – end of review. But instead I probed deep into the internet’s entrails to find a piece that captures and exceeds the idiosyncrasies of my own view.


Snippets from a review by Rich Kaserman in The Grumpus:

Has the “Mild Child of British Letters” grown claws and fangs? With Mitch Davies’ latest, Temporal Flesh, the bonhomie we saw in many previous characters gives way to an air of testiness instead, and his world view goes from bad yet hopeful to bad and likely to get worse. Some may say, “Good damn deal – it’s about time that he saw the dark,” but they were never part of his chirpy fan base to begin with.

… We first meet Haley Sipes in 1984 as a somewhat disaffected 15-year-old. She narrates the first section and appears in every section thereafter. In contrast to Jared Tyler, an insightful and creative contemporary of hers in Davies’ earlier Green Swan Commons, she is in most ways unremarkable. Perhaps that’s the point. Things happen to ordinary people, too.

… Hugh Woolworth is as self-interested as they come, and he feels no compunction whatsoever trampling toes in pursuit of his wants. He believes it’s better still when his marks fail to see through his oleaginous charms. Hugh also has the best, most acerbic wit; a devious and droll fellow. Within his advantaged tribe, he’s known as the scholarship boy – clever, but not born to money. His insights into class distinctions are worth repeating:

[...] while the wealthy are no more likely to be born stupid than the poor, a wealthy upbringing compounds stupidity while a hardscrabble childhood dilutes it, if only for Darwinian reasons. This is why the elite need a prophylactic barrier of shitty state schools, to prevent clever kids from working-class post codes ousting them from the Enclave of Privilege.

Haley held her own when she met Hugh, which certainly interested him. She’d had years to perfect her standoffishness. As far as edgy amusement is concerned, Davies reached his peak at this stage. Too bad he couldn’t sustain it for the remaining two-thirds of the book.

… Cris Reese was meant to have an enticing negativity as well. But the truth is, he’s unoriginal. He might just as well have been named Martin Amis for as thin as the veil turned out to be. Consider the evidence: Reese had a reputation for a drunken and libidinous lifestyle, had a famous father who wrote books that were hard to live up to, and early writing successes like Desiccated Embryos (as compared to Amis’s Dead Babies) lost luster with each new attempt to regain glory. Davies, in an interview, said this not an Amis send-up but rather a cautionary tale to himself. How many of us buy that? When you decide to break bad, you’ve got to own your contempt, Mitch.

… It’s hard to decide which is worse – the backpedalling (above) or the attempt to front-run criticism (below) with a preemptive joke on himself. This was from a critic’s review of Reese’s latest effort:

So why is Echo Must Die such a decomposing hog? One: Reese is so bent on avoiding cliché that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower. Two: The fantasy subplot clashes so violently with the book's State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?"

Speaking of violently clashing fantasy subplots, we get a stylized Armageddon when the Chronologues (in white hats) vie against the Ballastards (in black), all to minimal effect. What could Davies do, though, when his latest spin of the genre roulette wheel landed smack dab on fantasy? With this choice, we may wonder: Did the supernatural help get us to a greater truth? (Not really.) Were the atemporals important for making his point? (Probably not, though to be fair, do we know what the point was?) Did it fit as a piece within the Davies omni-world? (Yeah, I guess that was it.) One of the Chronologues said, “Some magic is merely normality that you're not yet used to.” And other magic, I’m here to point out, is just some writer’s random effluveum.

Beyond its gratuitous feel, this section simply failed as a showcase for Davies’ talent. If the chameleon he’s become was trying to spoof bad fantasy that’s one thing, but it’s not clear this was the case. And even if it was, to what benefit? My annoyance compounded with each passage like this: "The Act of Anesthesia is done. As per the plan, then: Marinus and Unalaq, you hiatus the icon to ensure he won't wake while Arkady, Oshima, and I psychoflame with every volt we've got." It made me want to self-administer an Act of Amnesia and pseudosomatically hurl with every erg in my being. While I’m piling on, I might as well mention this habit the Chronologues had of conversing with one another through unspoken mental means they called “subspeaking.” We get dissonant constructions like “subaddress”, “subreply” and “subpoint out.” An editor should have subsuggested dropping the contrived subspeech.

… Recognizing yet again the genre rotation, the repeated characters from previous books, and the linked novella structure, it’s fair to ask if the Davies bag of tricks is looking a bit threadbare from overuse.


As something of a counterpoint, I also found this book report that high school sophomore Stephie Botopp wrote. Though lacking sophistication, it spoke to me (which is not to say that it subspoke).

Temporal Flesh by Mitch Davies has many interesting characters, settings and themes. The six stories connect through Haley Sipes and the Radio People who sometimes show up like spirits to talk to her. In the first section of the book Haley is 15 and she talks about her bossy mom, her sketchy older boyfriend, and her insane times when she ran away from her home in England.

In the second section Haley is in her twenties and she works at a Swiss ski resort restaurant. There’s this hilarious guy, Hugh, who’s sketchy in a different way, but he’s smart, and he kind of falls for Haley. But one of those spirits (atemporals, they were called) asked him to join up with them and never age and go to battle against some other bunch of atemporals who were the good ones. The guy was skeezy enough to do it and he stood Haley up.

Then the third section was when Haley was in her thirties and she was married and had a kid, Aiouf, which bothered me a little because how do you pronounce that? Her husband was OK, but he was a war correspondent who would go after the hot story even when his family needed him.

The section after that was told from Cris Reese’s point of view. He was called the Wild Child of British Letters when he was young but by the time of this section he was old and just plain nasty. His books were getting worse and he would get into word fights all the time. A critic, who was one of the students that Hugh hung around with in the second section, ripped Reese’s latest book to shreds. The critic got into huge trouble, though, even though he was innocent. It was like an eye for an eye wasn’t enough. Reese took an eye, a tooth, part of an ear, and some fingers. In this section Haley is now old, like in her forties. She got to know Reese because she wrote a book everybody liked about the Radio People and they kept meeting at these random book fests doing promotions. Reese liked her, but it didn’t really go anywhere. Even after he got nicer, he was still kind of a dud.

The section after that was all about the atemporals. The good ones were immortal and had super powers, but the bad ones had powers, too, so they had epic battles. The good ones, called Chronologues, were vegetarians. The other ones, the Ballastards, were meat eaters. This was one of the themes: Good vs. Evil and whether you eat animals (and people). Anyway, these atemporals have long histories and it took a lot of pages to talk about it all and I hate to say it, but it got to be boring. If Davies was trying to be like J. K. Rowling, it didn’t work.

The last section was set further in the future in a rural part of Ireland where Haley lived with two grandchildren. It’s a terrible time because there was global warming, they ran out of oil, and the internet was down most of the time. This was another theme: we shouldn’t ruin our planet by being greedy and negligent because young people don’t deserve an apocalypse. At the end, do the good atemporals use some of their super powers to save the day? In the last section, that’s what we wonder. If I wasn’t already at the end of the page, I would have compared this messed up future world with Lord of the Flies. In summary, Davies uses many characters with some of them being supernatural to talk about important themes like good vs. evil and why we shouldn’t rape the planet that young people will inherit.

Actually, I had a few additional impressions that weren’t covered by these two selections.

» As a big fan of his past books, I’m inclined to cut Davies some slack. He’s such an exuberant storyteller that even the poor execution of the fantasy parts didn’t spoil it for me entirely. Besides, if these body-dwelling entities were meant figuratively as the strong influences that live within us and help drive our attitudes, actions and morality, I can buy into that.

» When Davies was a child, he spent hours constructing detailed maps and imaginative stories that no doubt comprised a grand vision. Fantasy was presumably a part of this. I guess I don’t want to see that creative boyhood world threatened.

» In interviews, Davies is said to view his collection of novels as one big Überbook. In fact, novels he has planned for the future also fit within this framework. I personally hope that his emphasis will be on the flesh and blood parts of this world.

» What are we to make of the point Kaserman made about Davies and his writer-character, Reese? Do we view this whole meta- thing as fun self-awareness or as a now tiresome post-modern ploy to remind us again that all of fiction is just made up? For that matter, what would we say about a review that meta-riffs on the same conceit?

3.5/5 unfairly rounded down to 3 because Davies’ bar is so high.