The worlds of the The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas seem to be the same place: Cloud Atlas characters Luisa Rey and Timothy Cavendish both appear briefly in The Bone Clocks, and the global catastrophe of Cloud Atlas is hinted at in the new book. Both fret about the fragility of modern society, and the inevitability of environmental collapse. Magic and technology-and technology that looks like magic-suffuse both novels. Like Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks cartwheels through time from the past to a post-apocalyptic future. Like Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks presents us with half a dozen characters, superficially unrelated, who are revealed to have a cryptic connection. The Bone Clocks certainly aspires to occupy the same strange headspace as Mitchell’s 2004 delight. First things first: Is David Mitchell’s new novel The Bone Clocks another Cloud Atlas, a multi-era-spanning masterpiece of literary ambition and dexterity?
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