Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell is back with another multi-stranded, time-hopping epic, and he is favourite to win the Booker prize
'I've got my next five books planned out. That's probably going to take me till I'm 60' … David Mitchell. Photograph: Patrick Bolger for the Guardian
The novelist David Mitchell doesn't believe in the death of the book. "Books take hundreds of years to disappear, once they're printed. That's just a fact, isn't it?" he says, mock quizzically. "But the internet, that depends on a network of power grids. That's not a matter of opinion. And those grids depend on energy sources. That isn't just some liberal sandal-wearing Guardian attitude." He smiles. And as the oil and gas run out, he asks, "Where is the energy coming from?"
That is one of the questions powering Mitchell's new book, The Bone Clocks, which is possibly his best novel yet. True to form, it features a set of interlocking stories in multiple genres. There is a teenage girl running away from home in the 1980s, a sociopathic Oxford undergraduate cavorting in the early 90s, the story of a war reporter, a literary satire about a novelist and his critic enemy, and an epilogue of dystopian near-future science fiction, with civilisation retreating in a global "Endarkenment". Irrupting into these stories, meanwhile, is a supernatural war. The good guys are a group of people who get reincarnated 49 days after they die, with full knowledge of their past lives. The bad guys achieve a kind of pseudo-immortality – they stop ageing, but can still be killed by violence or accident – by murdering psychic children, "decanting" their souls into an evil wine. "A book can't be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half-pregnant," a literary agent in the novel says, not having read this oneMore
No comments:
Post a Comment