The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

But for two pins I’d hand in blank papers and tell school where to shove Pythagoras triangles and Lord of the Flies and their life cycles of worms. I might, too. Yeah. I might just do that.

“Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Troubles,” Ian reaches for the ketchup, “every post-1920 revolution owes a debt to the Irish. The English reckon they handed Ireland over out of magnanimity, but no; the Irish won it back, by inventing modern guerrilla warfare.” “My aunt Roisín,” I reply, “says the English never remember and the Irish never forget.” Ian’s still slapping the bottom of the ketchup bottle, but nothing’s coming out. “I despair of humanity. We can put a man on the moon but can’t invent a way of getting tomato sauce out of a bottle without—” A huge dollop glollops out, smothering his bacon.

Christ, if guys could be girls being hit on by guys, just for one night, lines as cheesy as that’d go extinct.

Victims aren’t cowards. Outsiders, like, they never have a clue how brave you have to be just to carry on.

“Never done anything yourself, have yer?” Number Two is prodding Cheeseman’s chest with jet-black fingernails to italicize key words. “Never performed live to a real audience, have yer?” “Nor have I fucked a donkey, destabilized a Central American state, or played Dungeons & Dragons,” retorts Cheeseman, “but I reserve the right to hold opinions on those who do. Your show was a bobbing turd and I don’t take a word back.”

You’d think old age was a criminal offense, not a destination we’re all heading to.”

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.

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.

When a woman is interested in you, she’ll let you know; if not, there’s no aftershave, gift, or line you can spin to make her change her mind.

You need a leap of faith to leave your old life behind. True metamorphosis doesn’t come with flowcharts.”

“The world’s default mode is basic indifference. It’d like to care, but it’s just got too much on at the moment.”

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.”

Men marry women hoping they’ll never change. Women marry men hoping they will.

Because, of course, double negatives are truth smugglers, are censor outwitters.

“Namely, that in order to write, you need a pen and a place, or a study and a typewriter, or a laptop and a Starbucks—it doesn’t matter, because the pen and the place are symbols. Symbols for means and tradition. A poet uses a pen to write but, of course, the poet doesn’t make the pen. He or she buys, borrows, inherits, steals, or otherwise acquires the pen from elsewhere. Similarly, a poet inhabits a poetic tradition to write within, but no poet can single-handedly create that tradition. Even if a poet sets out to invent a new poetics, he or she can only react against what’s already there. There’s no Johnny Rotten without the Bee Gees.”

If you seek to represent the beauty, truth, and pain of the world in prose, if you seek to deepen character via dialogue and action, if you seek to unite the personal, the past, and the political in fiction, then you’re in pursuit of the same aims sought by the authors of the Icelandic sagas, right here, seven, eight, nine hundred years ago. I assert that the author of Njal’s Saga deploys the very same narrative tricks used later by Dante and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Molière, Victor Hugo and Dickens, Halldór Laxness and Virginia Woolf, Alice Munro and Ewan Rice. What tricks? Psychological complexity, character development, the killer line to end a scene, villains blotched with virtue, heroic characters speckled with villainy, foreshadow and backflash, artful misdirection. Now, I’m not saying that writers in antiquity were ignorant of all of these tricks but,” here I put my balls and Auden’s on the block, “in the sagas of Iceland, for the first time in Western culture, we find proto-novelists at work. Half a millennium avant le parole, the sagas are the world’s first novels.”

“Beware of asking people to question what’s real and what isn’t. They may reach conclusions you didn’t see coming.”

Iceland’s like Ireland; being famous here’s nothing special.”

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 love and are loved, whatever you do affects others.

Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless.

suggested that I preferred books to husbands. I agreed that books tended not to switch their stories whenever it suited them.

“A wrongheaded world,” sighed Shiloh Davydov, “where women needs must deny their gender for fear that their ideas will be dismissed.”

His presence made my skin creep.” “The wisdom of skin is underappreciated.

As you wish, but what’s the murder weapon? Holly drops the thing. “Rolling pin.” Where did you find a rolling pin in here? “I nicked it from your kitchen at 119A. Put it in my bag.” Holly stands up. I sedate her ankle and knees. Why? “You were all talking about the War, but I didn’t even have a Swiss Army knife. So—yeah, I know, hysterical woman, rolling pin, big fat cliché, Crispin would’ve rolled his eyes and said, ‘Oh, come on!’ but I wanted … y’know … something. I hate the sight of blood so I left the knives in the drawer and … so. Shit, Marinus. What have I done?” Killed a 250-year-old Atemporal Carnivore with a fifty-dollar kitchen implement, after putting on a fine impersonation of a sniveling, scared middle-aged woman. “The sniveling part was easy.”

Five years later, I take a deep, shuddery breath to stop myself crying. It’s not just that I can’t hold Aoife again, it’s everything: It’s grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office—all so we didn’t have to change our cozy lifestyles. People talk about the Endarkenment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it’s an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth’s Riches knowing—while denying—that we’d be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.

There’s a link between bigotry and bad spelling.

if you could reason with religious people, there wouldn’t be any religious people.

Which maybe wasn’t the best thing to say, but if there was a book called The Right Things to Do and Say as Civilization Dies, I’ve never read it.