“The Bone Clocks”, read in isolation, is a lonely journey. We start off well enough, following 15 year old Holly Sykes as she runs away from home and discovers her boyfriend sleeping with her best friend. Rather than facing her angry and right mother, she wanders further off, meeting stranger characters on her way to a strawberry picking farm.

The experiences on her journey are benign to begin with – an old lady fishing asking for asylum, exchanging her green tea in the trade, and a lovely pair of hipsters who pick her up on the side of the road and take her most of the way towards her destination.

It’s when, after eating a meal together and the hipsters are lounging in the sun that things start to go awry for Holly. Not that she would remember it.

After strawberry picking for a day or two, her school friend Ed cycles to her location to let her know her odd brother (who gave her the parting gift of a picture of a labyrinth when she vacated the family home), goes missing.

You’d think by this stage you’re in for an odd, yet interesting book, right?

Even the second novella, following Hugo Lamb is interesting enough. Through the first two novellas there was an underlying moral to each of the stories – you reap what you sow, etc. etc. So you can at least understand the wretchedness, and David Mitchell evokes emotions of astonishment, embarrassment, and surprise from his readers.

The third novella, outlining an adult Holly and her partner Ed’s relationship woes in the midst of a family wedding, with flashbacks to Ed.’s role as a journalist in war torn Iraq is consistent enough with the past two that whilst there seems to be little progression from the phenomenon experienced by Holly way back at the start of the book, there’s an assumption that these characters are critical to the story.

So by the time we hit Crispin’s novella, and yet another character who has extensive relationships and stories to tell, I’m getting a little tired of meeting numerous people who are doing very little to further the story.

Finally, at the next novella, we gain an understanding of what the heck happened back with Esther at the lake. Unfortunately for me, this was too little too late, and whilst there was a particularly spectacular action dialogue and meeting of minds etc. in this particular novella, it did little to repair the strangeness of the last few that I had to endure to get to this point. It ended quite nicely for my liking, so turning the page to find out I still had a ways to go until the end left me wondering, why?

The last novella is a dystopian set, where Holly is caring for her grandchildren in a vastly different world to the one we know. It very nearly renders the whole journey pointless, as there’s no tangible link between this novella and the others until right at the end. And again, it took a lot of blood and sweat to get to that point, but was perhaps not as rewarding as you would have anticipated.

Having read reviews of the book now, I understand that characters that to me, were introduced for the first time, are actually well know in some of Mitchell’s other work. That there is a theme and consistency between his books is all well and good, but it does make a solo novel difficult to hold together and maintain an interesting story at the same time.

I gather that the rave reviews of this novel come from dedicated readers who have an affinity with Mitchell’s work. If you’re not in that category, you might find it as hard to read as I did.

The Bone Clocks is the sixth novel by British author, David Mitchell. After an argument with her mother and an upsetting encounter with her unfaithful boyfriend, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes intends to get as far from Gravesend as possible. But Holly is no ordinary teen, and a chance meeting with a strange old woman on a jetty leads to a promise with repercussions many years later.

The story is split into six parts with different narrators: a rebellious teen; a self-centred, self-serving young man; a British journalist hooked on the excitement of the Middle East; an arrogant writer with a guilty secret; an Horologist in his fortieth life; and an elderly grandmother. The narratives of those whose lives intersect with Holly’s relate the major events of her life in a roundabout way while, at the same time, telling a thrilling tale of opposing forces and the inevitable battle that ensues.

The tale is told over some six decades and jumps from small town England to a Swiss ski resort, Iraq, Hay, Columbia, Western Australia, Shanghai, Iceland, New York, Canada and Ireland. Mitchell touches on a myriad of subjects: teen angst, infatuation and true love, career/family balance, literary critics and book fairs, the curse of privilege, socially conscious pop idols, the world’s reliance on technology and the pervasiveness of the internet.

His characters comment on: ageing (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”); religion (“..if you could reason with religious people, there wouldn’t be any religious people” and “Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better”); and technological advances (“Some magic is normality you’re not yet used to”).

He gives them words of wisdom (“People are icebergs, with just a bit you can see and loads you can’t” and “Mum said I’d learn betrayals came in various shapes and sizes, but to betray someone’s dream is the unforgiveable one”) and some lovely descriptive prose (“The English Channel’s biro-blue; the sky’s the blue of snooker-chalk.”)

His characters are appealing and readers may find themselves wondering for some time just whose intentions are pure and whose are not; some develop in depth and integrity as the story progresses. Holly is easy to admire, resourceful and engaging; her use of the rolling pin is definitely a laugh-out-loud moment.

This is a wonderfully crafted novel, with mysterious happenings building the intrigue until things begin to fall into place with the fifth narrative. Fans of Mitchell’s earlier novels will delight in (and quite probably be excited by) the connections (characters, locations, themes) with this one. Once again, Mitchell gives the reader a brilliant novel and it will be interesting to see what he does next.

The story itself is enjoyable but the quality of the book is poor. The text is fuzzy and pale and looks like it was printed on a cheap inkjet printer which makes it a bit hard to read.