The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

“S’pose heaven’s not like a painting that’s just hanging there forever, but more like … like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you’re alive, from passing cars, or … upstairs windows when you’re lost …”

There’s a moon sharp enough to cut your finger on.

Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.

Figures and shadows appear like a shadow-puppet show in the mind of someone going mad.

“Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.” Immaculée Constantin now looks up at me. “Power will notice you.

Another train passes below the window and cue crying scene: a scene as old as hominids and tear glands. It’s happening all over Planet Earth, right now, in all the languages there are. Mariângela wipes her face and looks away, and the Olly Quinns of the world sink to their knees, promising to make things right.

THE LINES ARE simple enough: “Men have imagined republics and principalities that never really existed at all. Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what ‘is’ for what ‘should be’ pursues his downfall rather than his preservation; for a man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.” For this plainspoken pragmatism, Cardinal Pole denounced Niccolò Machiavelli as the devil’s apostle. After Earl’s Court my carriage lurches into the dying light.

Sainte-Agnès plus New Year equals more Europussy than the Schleswig-Holstein Feline Rescue Society would know what to do with. And I’ll bet you a thousand quid that the feeling-conflicted line means she’s got another boyfriend.”

Submarine lights are strobing and a decent percentage of the two to three hundred dancing skeletons clad in young flesh and high-end apparel is young and female.

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.

Second, if an atrocity isn’t written about, it stops existing when the last witnesses die. That’s what I can’t stand. If a mass shooting, a bomb, a whatever, is written about, then at least it’s made a tiny dent in the world’s memory.

I think of Big Mac’s aphorism: In order to have sex, women need to feel loved; but in order for men to feel loved, we need to have sex. I’m keeping my half of the deal—so far as I know—but sexually, Holly acts like she’s forty-five or fifty-five, not thirty-five. Of course I’m not allowed to complain, because that’s pressurizing her. Once Holly and I could talk about anything, anything, but all these no-go areas keep springing up. It all makes me … I’m not allowed to be sad either, because then I’m a sulky boy who isn’t getting the bag of sweets he thinks he deserves.

pier. I can’t help but notice the woman walking towards us, because everything around her shifts out of focus. She’s around my age, give or take, and tall for a woman though not stand-outishly so. Her hair is white-gold in the sun, her velvet suit is the dark green of moss on graves, and her bottle-blue sunglasses will be fashionable some decades from now. I put on my own sunglasses. She compels attention. She compels. She’s way out of my class, she’s way out of anybody’s class, and I feel grubby and disloyal to Holly, but look at her, Jesus Christ, look at her—graceful, lithe, knowing, and light bends around her.

No, I’d ordinarily reply, it’s baby talk for grown-ups. But, then, whither humanity sans youth? Whither language sans neologisms? We’d all be Struldbrugs speaking Chaucerian.

Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well.” Pens scratch. “Oh, and beware of the verb ‘seem’; it’s a textual mumble. And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better.

“You know precognition, Holly,” says Esther. “It’s a flicker of glimpses. It’s points on a map, but it’s never the whole map.”

“Look, I’m a cancer survivor, I’m in my fifties, and I’ve never shot an air pistol even, and I’ve got no”—her hand dances—“psychopowers. Not like you, anyway. But I’m Aoife’s mother and Jacko’s sister and these—these individuals have harmed, or threatened, people I love. So here’s the thing: I’m dangerous.”

Yet all this was already there, packed into that magpie entrepôt like an oak tree packed into an acorn or the Chrysler Building folded up small enough to fit inside the brain of William Van Alen.

“The Cathar alphabet,” I tell her. “No one can read it now, not even heresiologists. The alphabet is descended from Oc, a language older even than Basque.”

This just made me smile.

I know the missing word. “If you’d cured Henry the Seventh’s TB with a course of ethambutol, or given Isaac Newton an hour’s access to the Hubble telescope, or shown an off-the-shelf 3-D printer to the regulars at the Captain Marlow in the 1980s, you would have had the M-word thrown your way, too. Some magic is merely normality that you’re not yet used to.”

An extension of Clarke's third law handily illustrated.

I browse among the trestle tables of apples and pears and vegetables too misshapen for Pearl Corp, home-cured bacon, honey, eggs, marijuana, cheese, homebrewed beer and poitín, plastic bottles and containers, knitted clothes, old clothes, tatty books, and a thousand things we used to give to charity shops or send to the landfill. When I first moved to the Sheep’s Head Peninsula thirty years ago, a West Cork market was where local women sold cakes and jam for the craic, West Cork hippies tried to sell sculptures of the Green Man to Dutch tourists, and people on middle-class incomes bought organic pesto, Medjool dates, and buffalo mozzarella. Now the market’s what the supermarket used to be: where you get everything, bar the basics found in the ration boxes.