*Starred Review* Reviewing Hari Kunzru's Gods without Men in the March 8, 2012, New York Times, Douglas Coupland coined the term translit to describe a new kind of novel that collapses time and space as it seeks to generate narrative traction in the reader's mind. The term itself has been gaining plenty of traction, too, as more and more writers adapt genre-bending strategies to a highly complex but entrancing form of literary fiction. Besides Kunzru, Haruki Murakami clearly falls into this category (especially his 1Q84, 2011), as does Nick Harkaway (in Angelmaker, 2012), but David Mitchell also deserves a seat at the head of the translit table, and his new book, The Bone Clocks, just may become the quintessential example of translit fiction, not only in its complexity and thematic richness, but also in the remarkable narrative propulsion that drives its many-cylindered engine. The book opens in the grand tradition of coming-of-age novels distinguished by their hypnotic, first-person narrators, but while the voice of British teenager Holly Sykes can hold its own with those of Holden Caulfield or John Green's Hazel Grace Lancaster, it is merely the opening salvo in this multivoiced, harmonically layered narrative symphony that stretches with occasional sojourns far back in time from the 1980s, when Holly runs away from home, into the 2040s, when she is attempting to cope with an oil-depleted world descending into chaos. But plot summaries are a far too simplistic device for talking about this novel. It is neither coming-of-age story nor dystopian fiction; nor is it fantasy, contemporary satire, or high-concept adventure thriller, though it surely has elements of all of those and more. That's the thing with translit: it shows us how feeble our pigeonholing genre categories can be when applied to a novel that sets out to break boundaries on multiple levels. Those boundaries begin to shatter when the young Holly hears what she calls the radio people, voices from another dimension. Gradually, Mitchell introduces us to an epic conflict being staged beyond the world of mundane life, a Harry Potter-like duel to the death between two groups able to traverse time: the Atemporals, also called Horologists, who are born with the capacity for living again after one self dies (they may die permanently, however, if they are killed before experiencing a natural death), and the Anchorites, who also have the psychic power to regenerate themselves but only if they feed (like vampires) off the souls of other psychically endowed mortals (like Holly). The Atemporals, led by a character called Marinus, a veteran of multiple lives over centuries, are trying both to save Holly from the Anchorites and to use her to help them deliver the coup de grâce that will wipe out the soul-decanting Anchorites forever. That sounds a little too cartoony, perhaps, but it doesn't read that way. Mitchell builds his characters as carefully as he does his worlds, and by the time the final battle takes place, we are thoroughly invested in the story and the people. By that time, too, we have followed those characters and many others through six time-jumping sections, each a smaller-scale tour de force of its own. Especially engaging is a section set essentially in the present and featuring a once-successful novelist watching his career slip away through a succession of writers' conferences that vividly capture the bane of creeping mediocrity. Remarkably, all of these disparate sections connect perfectly, not just as plot elements, but as aspects of a greater thematic whole. The novel is a meditation on mortality, of course, but also on the hazards of immortality and the perils of power. It is our failing novelist, though, who gives us the perfect metaphor for understanding the thematic reach of Mitchell's masterpiece. Rambling on about Icelandic literature at a conference in Reykjavík, he notes that writers are fascinated with the edges of maps. Those edges are at the heart of translit, and the The Bone Clocks delivers a finely detailed cartography of their every variation. This novel will be one of the most talked-about books of the year, as well it should be; it's a triumph on every one of its many levels.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2014 Booklist

"I DON'T summon anything up," protests Holly Sykes, the down-to-earth protagonist of "The Bone Clocks," David Mitchell's latest head-spinning flight into other dimensions. "Voices just ... nab me." She's trying to explain to a skeptical, curmudgeonly English writer how she occasionally falls out of time and sees what's going to happen next. Embarrassed about her gift - she's just a regular daughter of the owner of the Captain Marlow pub in Gravesend, Kent - and reluctant to credit such way-out ideas as precognition, she goes on, "Oh, Christ, I can't avoid the terminology, however crappy it sounds: I was channeling some sentience that was lingering in the fabric of that place." There you have it: a perfectly matter-of-fact, unvarnished evocation of how regular folks speak, married to a take-no-prisoners fascination with all that we can't explain. Coming from a writer himself famous for his gift for channeling voices (not least of pub-owners' daughters) and for his preternatural talent for seeing things, in the world, above it and all around it, the admission gives off a flash of unexpected self-revelation. (One recalls how the last novel Hilary Mantel published before her uncannily mediumistic "Wolf Hall" was about a woman full of demons who contacts the other world for a living.) "The Bone Clocks" - a perfect title for a novelist who's always close to the soil and orbiting the heavens in the same breath - is a typically maximalist many-storied construction: In one of its manifold secret corners, it sounds as if a sublimely original writer is wondering how much "writing's a pathology" (as one of his characters puts it) and whether it's possible to conjure up time-traveling characters and scenes from the distant past and future, yet not believe in magic. No one, clearly, has ever told Mitchell that the novel is dead. He writes with a furious intensity and slapped-awake vitality, with a delight in language and all the rabbit holes of experience, that no new media could begin to rival. (It's no coincidence that it was the makers of "The Matrix" who brought his previous epic, "Cloud Atlas," to the screen, in 2012, with limited success.) Mitchell sees the everyday with the startled freshness of a creature newly arrived from Epsilon Eridani, but amid all the glorious physical description - "The wood sounds like waves, with rooks tumbling about like black socks in a dryer" - there's always a trace of something metaphysical that lifts the roof off the contemporary novel and suggests there are many more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies. You may not believe in telepathy, second sight or reincarnation, but if you enter Mitchell's universe you can't not believe in them either. A deeply English writer born at the tail end of the 1960s, Mitchell began remaking fiction to his (extraterrestrial) specifications with his dazzling debut, "Ghostwritten," just before the turn of the millennium. Its nine disparate stories spin across eight countries, delivered with the dash and immediacy of a born storyteller, but seeded with just a hint of the idea that they're all in fact connected, and about the transmigration of the soul. In "Cloud Atlas," his third novel, Mitchell carried his intricate structuring even farther - some would say too far - to fashion a U-shaped series of interlocking stories that explored the idea of "eternal recurrence" all the way to a futuristic Korea and a post-apocalyptic world and back again. Having stretched language and narrative almost to the breaking point, he pulled back in his next one, "Black Swan Green," a resplendently textured coming-of-age story, set in England in 1982, about a 13-year-old boy whose super-alert sensitivity one could easily mistake for David Mitchell's. Now, in his sixth novel, he's brought together the time-capsule density of his eyes-wide-open adventure in traditional realism with the death-defying ambitions of "Cloud Atlas" until all borders between pubby England and the machinations of the undead begin to blur. from the first sentences of "The Bone Clocks," you know you're in David Mitchell Land. Fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes, ill-treated by a boyfriend and furious with her mother, runs away from home in 1984. We hear the "dozy-cow voice" of a woman she encounters. We watch sea gulls "scrawking for chips." We see how "the wind unravels clouds from the chimneys of the Blue Circle factory, like streams of hankies out of a conjurer's pocket." As ever, Mitchell writes a crunchily grounded, bitingly Anglo-Saxon prose that somehow makes room for the supernatural, as if D. H. Lawrence were reborn for the digital age. Yet even as Holly describes every Talking Heads record she listens to and notices how "the sea breeze and bike breeze... stroke my front like a pervy Mr. Tickle," a seasoned Mitchell decoder will observe that when the girl leaves Gravesend, she winds up in Allhallows-on-Sea, in St. Mary Hoo and Eastchurch. Some of the characters she meets are called Cross and Lamb and Bishop. And, to compound the existential shivers, this typical teenager, breathing in the smells of "warm tarmac, fried spuds and week-old rubbish," is prey to inexplicable visitations and "daymares" in which she slips into another universe. We're in the realm of hyper-realism and half-religious allegory all at once. In the chapters that follow, Mitchell characteristically vaults through six different worlds, crossing decades as effortlessly as in "Cloud Atlas" he leapt over epochs, and throwing off mini-novels that double as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Suddenly, we're in 1991, in the privileged circles of a too-clever Cambridge undergraduate. (Mitchell can go up and down the register of the English class system as few writers have done this side of Lawrence.) Then we're with an adrenaline-addicted war correspondent in Iraq in 2004; then on a global book tour in 2015 with a splenetic English novelist on the way down; then inside the mind of an African-Canadian clinical psychiatrist in the year 2025 (Metallica's still in the air) before ending up in a nuclear wilderness in 2043, after a deluge of viruses and natural disasters. Mitchell can do Norwegian letter-writers, early 19th-century Russian serf girls, Ph.D.s droning on about the soul as a "pre-Cartesian avatar." But a majority of his characters here are cads, borderline criminals and, most of all, scoffers who pride themselves on knowing that the "paranormal is always, always a hoax." Yet every time their plans precipitate disaster and even death, they turn to Providence to justify what's happened. The minute they do so, skeptics come to sound like believers. Meanwhile, not-quite-normal figures keep appearing and talking mysteriously about a "Script," opening an attic window to one of Mitchell's favorite themes - free will - and, by extension, how much of our lives and deeds we can ascribe to something beyond us. Not every part across these 624 pages is fresh. But with Mitchell it's the whole, the way he stitches the pieces together to make something greater than their sum, that makes the work unique. When the narrator in the second section starts reading from Joseph Conrad to a Brigadier Philby in a nursing home, one thinks back to the Captain Marlow pub, which now sounds like a Conrad allusion. With a passing glance at the Thousand Autumns Restaurant and an allusion, 448 pages on, to a character called de Zoet, with a reference to the Dutch settlement at Dejima in Japan, Mitchell invites us to see this book as somehow connected to his previous novel, "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet," partly set in Dejima. And as Holly keeps cropping up through the decades, even as a writer recounting events we've already witnessed, you realize you're entering a self-contained universe and mythology, half Joyce and half Tolkien, that follows its own laws, not least when it comes to gravity. As all this suggests, Mitchell is in love with possibility. His sentences jump and shine with rude health: "Icicles drip drops of bright in steep-sloped streets." And though his characters frequently off their rivals, there's an earnest warmth to his energy, a boyish delight in his sensory devouring of everything around him, that never gives off the sour taste or intellectualism of a lot of virtuoso fiction. He clearly believes not just in words, alternate realities, burps of synchronicity, but in the excitement of thinking about belief and extending its borders without losing the clank of the real. The many hard-core Mitchellites across the globe may also detect in this book a new concern with children and a tender parental solicitude, nicely encircled by his enduring respect for the elderly. In its penultimate section, the novel travels too far into Marvel Comicsdom for my tastes, and reads almost like a fresh "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" episode, something an unusually ingenious father might spin to his boys. As Atemporals take on the Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar to save the world and we read, "One, it's against the Codex. Two, she is chakra-latent, so she may react badly to scansion and redact her own memories," my eyes started to glaze over for all the uppercase neologisms and references to "psychosoterics of the Deep Stream." Even Holly, who has met these characters in the flesh, says, "You lost me at 'Atemporals.'" For my money, Mitchell is far better at suggesting mystery than at pulling off creatures of the "Shaded Way." Action is not his forte; he's a wizard, rather, at dialogue and "air shimmering with bells and cold as mountain streams," the dizzying lights of Shanghai, the sun-baked wastes of Iraq and the Marine talk that crackles across them. His take on everyday life is so alive and so much his own that it seems a waste when he starts inventing realities, as so many other writers do. But no matter. In his final section, Mitchell brings his narrative boat back into the harbor with another arrow-sharp vignette, this one set in rural Ireland in the year 2043, as the electricity's running out, the Internet seems about to crash for good and people are reduced to foraging for rabbits and eating dried seaweed. Again he catches every last earthbound detail and cadence - "A mistle thrush is singing on my spade in the kale patch" - even as he suggests, in a larger way, that civilization itself is an act of faith, the myth we create together to keep ourselves going. We're a little farther from "The Lord of the Rings" here, back in the primal landscape that seems to be one of Mitchell's spiritual homes, rich with the elementalism of a reborn "Lord of the Flies." Not many novelists could take on plausible Aboriginal speech, imagine a world after climate change has ravaged it and wonder whether whales suffer from unrequited love. One thinks of Holly quoting a wise elder: "Life's a matter of Who Dares Wins." Other writers may be more moving, and some may push deeper, but very few excite the reader about both the visceral world and the visionary one as Mitchell does. Where "Black Swan Green" introduced a typical English boy with a stammer who had to reinvent language to avoid words beginning with certain letters, "The Bone Clocks" begins to suggest how a great writer "flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder" to give us an astonishing ventriloquism that regularly expands our lives. All borders between pubby England and the machinations of the undead begin to blur. PICO IYER is a distinguished presidential fellow at Chapman University. His most recent book is "The Man Within My Head."

Using a variation of the storytelling structure he employed in Cloud Atlas, Mitchell weaves six interrelated first-person narratives into an epic tale that "follows" the character Holly Sykes from 1984 to 2043. Mitchell presents the reader with everyday human experiences that carry the hint-and sometimes more than a hint-of something supernatural affecting the lives of people ("bone clocks") on Earth. Clever, engaging, and often fun (readers of earlier Mitchell works should look for familiar characters), this novel is slightly flawed but eventually successful. The flaw is in the fifth narrative, in which listeners learn about those supernatural beings, immortals ("atemporals") who are waging an epic battle between good and evil; the storytelling here becomes slightly tedious but finds its footing again in the sixth and final narrative. VERDICT Although this type of story structure can be difficult to follow in audio form, the use of six readers-Jessica Ball, Leon Williams, Colin Mace, Steven Crossley, Laurel Lefkow, and Anna Bentinck-helps listeners find their way through this sweeping and ultimately extremely satisfying tale. ["Quite a lot of book and not for easy-reading fans, but it's brilliant," read the starred review of the Random hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 10/10/14; an LJ Top Ten Best Book of 2014.]-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Mitchells latest could have been called The Rime of the Ancient Marinusthe youthful ancient Marinus, that is. Another exacting, challenging and deeply rewarding novel from logophile and time-travel master Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, 2004, etc.).As this long (but not too long) tale opens, were in the familiar territory of Mitchells Black Swan Green (2006)Thatchers England, that is. A few dozen pages in, and Mitchell has subverted all that. At first its 1984, and Holly Sykes, a 15-year-old suburban runaway, is just beginning to suss out that its a scary, weird place, if with no shortage of goodwilled protectors. She wants nothing but to get away: The Thames is riffled and muddy blue today, and I walk and walk and walk away from Gravesend towards the Kent marshes and before I know it, its 11:30 and the towns a little model of itself, a long way behind me. Farther down the road, Holly has her first inkling of a strange world in which Horologists bound up with one Yu Leon Marinus and, well, sort-of-neo-Cathars are having it out, invited into Hollys reality thanks to a tear in her psychic fabric. Are they real? As one strange inhabitant of a daymare asks, But why would two dying, fleeing incorporeals blunder their way to you, Holly Sykes? Why indeed? The next 600 pages explain why in a course that moves back and forth among places (Iceland, Switzerland, Iraq, New York), times and states of reality: Holly finds modest success in midlife even as we bone clocks tick our way down to a society of her old age that will remind readers of the world of Slooshas Crossin from Cloud Atlas: The oil supply has dried up, the poles are melting, gangs roam the land, and the old days are a long way behind us. We live on, says an ever unreliable narrator by way of resigned closing, as long as there are people to live on in.If Thatchers 1984 is bleak, then get a load of what awaits us in 2030. Speculative, lyrical and unrelentingly darktrademark Mitchell, in other words. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.