Summary: The Bone Clocks

975 Words2 Pages

1. Main Character
While this work of fiction shifts perspectives throughout the tale, the main character is revealed as fifteen year old Miss Holly Sykes. As The Bone Clocks opens, we are in an Irish pub that Holly’s family owns, while [Holly] argues with her Mam about [Holly’s] male interest of the moment. In the beginning Holly is a thin girl with dark black hair who is madly in love with her twenty four year old boyfriend Vinny. After her mother slaps her for being impertinent, Holly goes up to her room and assesses her appearances.
“I only cry a bit, and it’s shocked crying, not boo-hoo crying, and when I’m done I go to the mirror. My eyes’re a bit puffy, but a bit of eyeliner soon sorts that out…Dab of lippy, bit of blusher…Sorted. …show more content…

Setting
Considering this novel is set in many time periods, it comes with quite a few physical locations and cultural settings. A few of the major settings are in England, the Swiss Alps, New York, Australia and Iceland. The best way to describe the atmosphere of the book is fluid. While certain moments can be filled with tension and expectation, other parts can be very relaxed and loving or even mystical and mind-blowing. The settings and times are constantly shifting but they manage to stay still long enough to give the impression of stability for the characters.
I cannot seem to find a pattern between the individuals and the corresponding settings, but I have noticed every place is of varying significance—no matter how slight—for the developing storyline. Each place also seems to connect to the person(s) through the fact they went there of their own volition, for their own character development. All the small, innocuous details the characters notice when they are alone are what make them seem more human. Those are the things about the setting’s constant shifting which are important because they make the setting seem more …show more content…

In the fifth section of the book, Marinus states, “We live in this spiral of resurrections involuntarily. We don’t know how, or why us. We never sought it…but no one pays for our atemporality,” (Mitchell 451). It is not even fifty pages later, we find out the Anchorites— the self-elected and carnivorous atemporals—consume the psychovoltaic souls of innocent people to fuel their own immortality (Mitchell 489). When the Horologists go to find Esther Little, they uncover she hid herself, or her soul to be more accurate, inside Holly Sykes psyche because “Her soul would have needed years to reravel…Years when Esther was as vulnerable to attack as someone in a coma,” (Mitchell

Open Document