The Bone Clocks

“I tapped on the glass and said, ‘Hi, Jacko, I’m your big sister,’ and his fingers waggled, just a tiny, tiny bit, like he was waving. The God’s honest truth, that; nobody else saw but I felt a tickle in my heart and I felt willing and able to kill to protect him, if I had to. I still feel it, when some twat talks ’bout the ‘weirdo’ or the ‘freak’ or the ‘premature one.’ People can be so crap. Why’s it okay to draw spaceships if you’re seven, but not okay to draw diabolical mazes? Who decides that spending money on Space Invaders is fine, but if you buy a calculator with loads of symbols you’re asking to be picked on? Why’s it okay to listen to the Top 40 on Radio 1 but not okay to listen to stations in other languages? Mam and Dad sometimes decide Jacko needs to read less and play footy more, and for a bit he’ll act more like a normal seven-year-old kid, but it’s only acting, and we all know it. Just now and then who he really is smiles out at me through the blacks of Jacko’s eyes, like someone watching you from a train zipping past. At those times, I almost want to wave, even though he’s just across the table, or we’re passing on the stairs.”

Holly expresses her love for Jacko as an acceptance of his personality, including the qualities that many, including his parents, consider quirky. When it is later revealed that Jacko was actually the host for the Atemporal known as Xi Lo, Holly accepts that Xi Lo and her brother were always one and the same. This passage foreshadows Holly’s allegiance to Xi Lo in the Atemporal war.

“‘An invisible war’s going on,’ says Heidi, which confuses me till I realize she doesn’t mean the slow traffic, ‘all through history—the class war. Owners versus slaves, nobles versus serfs, the bloated bosses versus workers, the haves versus the have-nots. The working classes are kept in a state of repression by a mixture of force and lies.’”

Heidi, who is a Socialist, makes this statement about the class war between the masses and those in power. However, this statement also resonates with the conflict between the Atemporals and its effect on mortals. Mitchell thus establishes the overarching tensions of the novel as an allegory for sociopolitical conflicts and their impact on the lives of ordinary citizens.

“Being born’s a hell of a lottery.”

In this passage, Holly observes how differently her life appears to be from Heidi’s. While it might be interpreted as an expression of envy on one hand, the statement also resonates with the fortuitousness that dictates the fates of many characters, mortals and Atemporals alike—a description that connects to the novel’s potent symbol of the Script, a pre-ordained depiction of events to come.

“Mortality is inscribed in your cellular structure, and you say you’re not ill?”

Immaculée Constantin makes this statement to convince Hugo Lamb to join the Anchorites. The description that mortality is an illness is representative of the Anchorites’ view of humans as a lesser species. When the Anchorites invite someone to join their numbers, they promise to cure them, overcoming their mortality through the act of decanting—vampirically consuming the souls of others.

“Half of my fellow Humberites—unless their parents are good and willing milkers—are so up to their nostrils in debt and denial that for their first five working years they’ll have to take whatever shit gets flung their way and act like it’s caviar. Not I. I’ll throw it back. Harder.”

Hugo’s primary motivation is to socially and financially ascend to higher status, unlike his friends who already have noble or affluent backgrounds and thus feel no need to reach for greater privilege. Hugo is aggrieved that his friends can react to debt and liability by tapping into their vast wealth of resources, feeling resentful and victimized by their situation and reacting to his perceived misfortunes through retaliation.

“Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.”

Prior to this passage, the quasi-sociopathic Hugo declares himself immune to love, acting as though he is incapable of succumbing to being vulnerable with another person or caring about someone else’s feelings. But this passage reveals what Hugo is hiding—his capacity for love and his fear of what it would require from him.

“I created Anyder not only as fake account holder to own and obscure my ill-gotten gains, but to be a better, sharper, truer version of Hugo Lamb. But if a privileged clot like Chetwynd-Pitt can see through me so easily, I’m not as clever and Anyder isn’t as hidden as I’ve believed up until now. And even if I am a master dissembler, so what? So what if I join a City firm in eight months, and stab and bluff my way to a phone-number income within two years? So what if I own a Maserati convertible, a villa in the Cyclades, and a yacht in Poole harbor by the turn of the century? So what if Marcus Anyder builds his own empire of stocks, properties, portfolios? Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark. See how the light needs shadows.”

Hugo Lamb relies on the persona he’s created to concretize his aspirations. He sees Marcus Anyder as the version of himself that has achieved affluence, brushing aside the moral consequences of the actions he would need to commit to reach his goals. From his perspective, the consequences are as ephemeral as his time in the world. Thus, he must do what he can to obtain his greatest desires.

“This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator.”

Hugo initially resists his attraction to Holly by personifying love and antagonizing it. He describes love paradoxically, calling it a greedy dictator. However, the demands of love merely brush against his personal aspirations, committing him to look after someone other than himself.

“Neither would I want to travel back to my and the Humberites’ very undergrad discourse on the nature of love at Le Croc the other night, but if I did I’d tell Fitzsimmons et al. that love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death. Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you to Holly, who breathes like the sea. This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: ‘I love you.’ No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.”

After spending the night at Holly’s apartment flat, Hugo’s perspective of love changes completely. He uses hyperbolic metaphors to describe how much his attraction to Holly has seized his thoughts and feelings, such as solar fusion. Without Holly’s love, Hugo feels that his whole world may come to a halt.

“Love is more strong than the death.”

Nasser reaches this conclusion while describing a song that he, Aziz, and Ed hear on the way to Fallujah. The statement resonates with Holly’s love for her family and friends, which allow her to overcome the causes or circumstances of their deaths. The love that Holly and Jacko share for each other, for instance, enables Holly to escape from the Dusk. Similarly, Holly’s love for her grandchildren ensures their survival in a deeply hostile world.

“At the sink, he tentatively reaches out for the soap dispenser; a frothy blob blooms and drops onto his hand. ‘Look at that! Life’s more science-fictiony by the day. It’s not just that you get old and your kids leave; it’s that the world zooms away and leaves you hankering for whatever decade you felt most comfy in.’”

Holly’s father, Dave, makes this comment while talking to Ed in the washroom. He describes the approach of the future as the world suddenly falling away from each generation. This foreshadows Crispin Hershey’s feelings about his generation ending while he is in Iceland.

“I’m an addict, Holly. Life is flat and stale when I’m not working.”

Ed’s central character flaw is his addiction to work, which keeps him from the duties of fatherhood. As an award-winning journalist, he finds validation in the thrill he experiences on the field and the acclaim he receives for putting himself into danger. His character arc revolves around overcoming the need for excitement to bring meaning into his life and recommit to his obligations to specific people close to him rather than only to a generic readership that often doesn’t consume or internalize his work.

“Crispin, bury that hatchet. Hatchets don’t work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself. Believe me. I know of what I speak.”

Levon Frankland gives Crispin this advice while they are talking about Crispin’s father, the filmmaker Anthony Hershey. The passage subtly hints at Crispin’s insecurities as someone who lives in the shadow of his father. Levon tells him that he must live without grudge and resentment—his father is no longer around, so his bitterness will only harm Crispin.

“These twenty-first-century children of Iceland are plugged into headsets but still exude that Nordic confidence and sense of wellbeing, even the two African Icelanders and a girl in a Muslim headdress. All have a 2 in front of their birth year and need barely scroll down an inch when finding it on an online form. They carry a fragrance of hair conditioner and fabric conditioner. Their consciences are as undented as cars in a dealership showroom, and all are bound for the world’s center stage, where they’ll challenge, outperform, and patronize us old farts at our retirement parties, as we did when we looked that beautiful.”

Crispin recalls the sentiments expressed by Dave Sykes in Part 3, noting how different the world of the 21st century feels compared to the previous one, in which he was born and raised. By recognizing that he used to be where the children are now, Crispin evokes the cyclical nature of time and history, signaling that his time is coming to an end.

“Writers don’t write in a void. We work in a physical space, a room, ideally in a house like Laxness’s Gljúfrasteinn, but we also write within an imaginative space. Amid boxes, crates, shelves, and cabinets full of…junk, treasure, both cultural—nursery rhymes, mythologies, histories, what Tolkien called ‘the compost heap’; and also personal stuff—childhood TV, homegrown cosmologies, stories we hear first from our parents, or later from our children—and, crucially, maps. Mental maps. Maps with edges. And for Auden, for so many of us, it’s the edges of the maps that fascinate.”

Crispin’s lecture is an extension of Literature’s Role in Preserving Memory. The central thesis of his talk is that writers work not in a vacuum but in a tradition, often reacting to the work of those who preceded them, as well as to the details of the world in which they live. Symbolically, he describes the imaginative space that writers inhabit as a mental map, which also calls to mind the recurring mazes and labyrinths the characters must learn to navigate.

“I’ve striven to be witty since Wanda in Oils.

Letting it go feels so sodding liberating.”

Crispin’s personal development is concretized in this passage, where he realizes that he has overcome his desire for his father’s approval. He has spent his entire career trying to use wit to distinguish himself, only to realize that he has already done so effortlessly with the people in his life, including Holly, Aoife, and Örvar.

“For a Returnee like myself, each resurrection is a lottery of longitudes, latitudes, and demography. We die, wake up as children forty-nine days later, often on another landmass.”

Holly’s earlier statement about the fortuitous nature of the world echoes this description of Horologist resurrection as a kind of lottery. The random nature of Atemporal resurrection, which follows a predictable timeline but comes with wild vacillations of geography, is similar to the accident of mortal birth, in which status is determined by where and to whom they are born. Possibly for this reason, Atemporals who do not prolong existence through vampiric decanting still empathize and connect to the humans around them, seeing them as fellow creatures rather than livestock.

“While much of her true name lay beyond my knowledge of the Noongar language, as the minutes passed I understood that her name was also a history of her people, a sort of Bayeux Tapestry that bound myth with loves, births, deaths; hunts, battles, journeys; droughts, fires, storms; and the names of every host within whose body Moombaki had sojourned.”

Marinus wonders at the splendor of Esther Little’s true name in this passage, which points to the importance of language and literature to human memory. Esther’s name is described as carrying “the history of her people”—within the oral tradition of her true name lies an entire population. When Esther instructs Marinus to remember her name so that he can free her from her asylum, she ensures that this history survives for several decades more.

“On my weakest days, I wonder why we Atemporals of Horology, who inherit resurrection as birthright, who possess what the Anchorites kill to obtain a twisted variation of, why don’t we just walk away from it? Why do we risk everything for strangers who’ll never know what we’ve done, win or lose?”

Marinus expresses doubt about the destiny of Horologists, wondering whether immortality has any real value when it must be risked to ensure the protection of mortals. This flawed perspective deepens Marinus’s character, showing that immortality does not necessarily guarantee a total awareness of the responsibility that comes with it. It also resonates with the theme of Morality in a Secular World.

“Horology’s War is my War. Yes, I am only a pawn, but a game of chess may hinge upon the conduct of a single pawn.”

Sadaqat makes this statement while assuring Marinus of his participation in the Second Mission. He recognizes the contradiction of being a pawn. In chess, pawns are objectively the weakest pieces. However, they are able to effect surprising changes in the dynamics of power, which is precisely what Sadaqat achieves through his eventual betrayal of Horology, and what Holly achieves by granting Esther Little asylum.

“Normal is whatever you have come to take for granted. To your ancestor in 1024, your life in 2024 would seem equally improbable, mystifying, full of marvels.”

Most of the observations about cyclical changes in culture and history have been about events in the novel. In this passage, Marinus retroactively expands the scope, suggesting that the everyday present world would have been seen as extraordinary by those who came before. This also foreshadows the visionary tenor of Mitchell’s speculative future in the novel’s final section.

“‘If you’d known Horology for longer than five days, Ms. Sykes,’ Sadaqat walks up to the far end of the long table and leans on it as if he owns it, ‘you would eventually wake up to the fact that Horology is a club for immortals, who prevent others from attaining their own privileges. They are aristocrats. They are very like a white country—so sorry to bring race into this, but the analogy is spot on—a rich, white, imperial, exploitative bastion, which torpedoes the refugee boats coming from the Land of the Huddled Brown Masses. What I have done is to choose survival. Any living being would do the same.’”

In this passage, Sadaqat explains his reasons for betraying Horology, leveraging his identity as a person of color to compare the historical treatment of marginalized peoples to the way he has been treated by the Horologists. Sadaqat’s primary assertion is that he serves Horology without promise of reward in the same way that many people of color have been deceived into serving the imperialist agenda of colonial masters. Sadaqat will soon learn, however, that he has been deceived into the promise of immortality by the Anchorites as well, making them no better than the Atemporals he has betrayed.

“‘Sleep tight, Gran, don’t let the bedbugs bite.’ Dad used to say that me, I used to say it to Aoife, Aoife passed it on to Lorelei, and now Lorelei says it back to me.

We live on, as long as there are people to live on in.”

Holly reaffirms the power of language to perpetuate memory while also showing how the responsibility to sustain history is cyclical. One generation may find that the kindness they extend to the next can come back to them two generations later.