The drop diffused through each of the six sections of "The Bone Clocks" is named Holly Sykes, a 15-year-old English runaway when she narrates the first section, set in the Orwellian year of 1984.
"Yet what is any ocean," he asks, "but a multitude of drops?" We may, as the narrator concluding Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" (2004) acknowledges, each be a lone drop from a limitless ocean. This isn't a cute literary game, but a variation on a key theme woven through all of Mitchell's work: We're bound to the lives going on around us as well as before and after us, lending significance to every life and each of our decisions. It's all full speed ahead for Mitchell's own incredible career, consciously referenced in yet another Mitchell novel where wandering characters from prior Mitchell novels make an appearance. "Half way along our journey to life's end I found myself astray in a dark wood," admits one of Mitchell's protagonists - invoking the opening of Dante's "The Divine Comedy" to describe his midlife crisis, which prominently features the decline of his once-promising career as a novelist.
Count on David Mitchell - whose novels regularly suggest a Borgesian library - to invoke one of the most famous literary labyrinths of all in "The Bone Clocks," his extraordinary new novel:
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