Mind the Gap(s): Holly Sykes’s Life, the ‘Invisible’ War, and the History of the Future in The Bone Clocks

Abstract

David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) features a complex temporal scheme. Critics have discussed the novel as an allegory of mortality and in terms of labyrinthine time and reincarnation time. I herein discuss it in terms of elided time, examining the ellipses or breaks in temporal continuity that the novel so prominently highlights. Although what we might arguably call the main narrative covers Holly Sykes’s lifetime, most of that span is not narrated. Drawing on current discussions of the Anthropocene and climate change, I explore how The Bone Clocks, through its narrative ellipses, spurs readers to link past causes and future effects and to pay attention to the attritional environmental destruction that is taking place across a vast time-scale. Mitchell writes a history of the future that cautions us to mind the gaps.