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The Bone Clocks, Climate Change, and Human Attention

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The Bone Clocks, Climate Change, and Human Attention humanities Article Seeing What’s Right in Front of Us: The Bone Clocks, Climate Change, and Human Attention Elizabeth Callaway Environmental Humanities Program, The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA; [email protected] Received: 1 November 2017; Accepted: 18 January 2018; Published: 26 January 2018 Abstract: The scales on which climate change acts make it notoriously difficult to represent in artistic and cultural works. By modeling the encounter with climate as one characterized by distraction, David Mitchell’s novel The Bone Clocks proposes that the difficulty in portraying climate change arises not from displaced effects and protracted timescales but a failure of attention. The book both describes and enacts the way more traditionally dramatic stories distract from climate connections right in front of our eyes, revealing, in the end, that the real story was climate all along. Keywords: climate change; clifi; digital humanities; literature and the environment Climate change is notoriously difficult to render in artistic and literary works. In the environmental humanities, there is an entire critical conversation around how and whether climate change can be represented in current cultural forms. The challenges often enumerated include the large time scales on which climate operates (Nixon 2011, p. 3), the displacement of climate effects (p. 2) literary plausibility of including extreme events in fiction (Ghosh 2016, p. 9), and the abstract nature of both the concept of climate (Taylor 2013, p. 1) and the idea of collective human action on the planetary scale (Chakrabarty 2009, p. 214). In this article, I argue that David Mitchell’s novel The Bone Clocks proposes a different primary difficulty in representing climate change. It is not that climate change causes and effects are too slow or displaced to be felt with immediacy or that climate is too abstract. Rather, the novel indicates that climate effects are all around us all the time. Climate change is right there, available to our immediate experience. Similarly, the connections among industry, current lifestyles, and climate are readily observable. However, The Bone Clocks models the encounter with climate as characterized primarily by a failure of attention to those signals that are right in front of us. Over the course of the book climate is made present only to be immediately ignored in favor of the more conventional stories of interpersonal drama and the struggle between good and evil. The Bone Clocks is a fictional exploration of the discrepancy between the stories literature is proficient at telling and the stories it needs to take on in the face of climate change. Simultaneously, it is an example of the new type of story that our era of anthropogenic climate change demands. Engagement in environmental themes is a characteristic of David Mitchell’s work more broadly. By the end of Cloud Atlas, nearly the whole globe is uninhabitable, and in Ghostwritten, an artificial intelligence called “Zookeeper” is deciding humanity’s fate given that, in its analysis, humanity is wrecking the planet through oil spills, attempted nuclear strikes, river contamination, sea level rise, and mass extinctions (Mitchell 2007, p. 419). Critics have read the environmental element in Mitchell’s works as concerned with a “transhistorical predacity that drives human civilizations” (Shoop and Ryan 2015, p. 93). This predacity results in social injustice, raises questions about Enlightenment notions of progress (Ng 2015, p. 107), and causes the environmental catastrophes through which humanity reaps the consequences of its own nature (Harris 2015b, p. 5). Scholars have noted that the expanded spatial and temporal scales at which Mitchell’s narratives take place allow for this consideration of slow-moving environmental catastrophe that takes generations to play out Humanities 2018, 7, 11; doi:10.3390/h7010011 www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities Humanities 2018, 7, 11 2 of 12 (Harris 2015a, p. 149). For example, Ian Baucom argues that Cloud Atlas narrates the many entangled timescales of environmental damage—geological time, human species time, lifetimes, and organic time—resulting in the portrayal of humanity as an active force in natural history (Baucom 2015, p. 137). And while Cloud Atlas, Ghostwritten, and even Slade House take place across decades and around the globe, none of Mitchell’s novels engages climate change so directly as does The Bone Clocks, which ends with a drastically changed climate. While much of Mitchell’s oeuvre has been read as speaking to our current moment of environmental crisis, my focus will be on the narration of inattention to rather than the presence of readily observable environmental degradation. As Min Hyong Song suggests, depiction (like Mitchell’s) of increased connections among far-flung places and timescales might be incidental rather than integral to grappling with planetary environmental concerns. While Song is interested in how Karen Tei Yamashta’s work represents a “planetary becoming” that evinces an interest in how environmental concerns increasingly underlie globalized social relations (Song 2011, p. 557), I am interested in how Mitchell depicts the inability to sustain concentration on this very connection between the ecological and the social that is Song’s primary interest. While The Bone Clocks does present humanity as an active force in natural history, this is coupled with the inability to tell ourselves the kinds of stories that would be necessary to represent humanity as such. The Bone Clocks begins prosaically in 1984 with a 15-year-old, working-class teen, Holly Sykes, who leaves her parent’s house after a fight with her mother intent on living with her older boyfriend. Though Holly narrates only the first chapter and the final one (this time as a 74-year-old matriarch), her life will become one of the narrative threads that hold the novel together. The Bone Clocks consists of six relatively independent stories told in five voices across six decades. While the first and last chapters are narrated by Holly, the other four sections are told by a con-artist/Cambridge undergraduate (Hugo Lamb), an Iraq War journalist (Ed Brubeck), a failing novelist (Crispin Hershey), and a Canadian psychologist/immortal being (Iris Fenby/Marinus). The appearance of Holly in each of these character’s lives as a love interest, spouse, friend, and an ally connects each piece into a loose whole. Holly is the connective tissue of the novel, and though the middle sections are primarily concerned each narrator’s own travails rather than Holly, we see snapshots of her life through various perspectives across the decades. In addition to Holly, the stories are held together by the intermittent eruption of a fantasy subplot (or uberplot) into each section. This fantasy plot both ties together and interrupts the narratives in each chapter, injecting what is otherwise a story about family life, marriage strain, career choices, midlife crises, and teenage angst with epic stakes. The characters each get embroiled in one way or another in an “invisible” war that is taking place between two groups of immortal characters. One group, the “Atemporals” are benevolent and are simply reborn into recently vacated bodies upon their death (with consciousness and memories intact). The other group, the “Anchorites” (who are also referred to as “carnivores”), steals immortality by murdering psychically inclined innocents in an arcane ceremony that allows them to ingest souls and thereby halt the aging process. If this summary of a book that is both about the intricacies of everyday family life and an eternal battle between immortal beings seems fraught in terms of genre, it is because this is the case. Even for an author known for pastiche, parody, and juxtaposition, The Bone Clocks is generically surprising. Cloud Atlas, after all is composed of six stories all of different genres (19th-century travel writing, epistolary novel, detective fiction, social farce, dystopia, and post-apocalyptic science fiction). But in Cloud Atlas, these genres stay relatively confined to their story; they don’t erupt into the middle of what is otherwise literary fiction or “‘serious’ realism,” as Joseph Metz designates it in his perceptive article on genre in The Bone Clocks. I follow Metz in reading the novel as characterized by “the permeation of these most recognizably mimetic aspects of the text by “supernatural” elements” (Metz 2017, p. 122). What Metz calls “supernatural elements” and “pulp mayhem,” I instead follow the novel in calling “fantasy.” In moments of sometimes hilarious self-reference, the novel often slyly refers to its more imaginative elements as “fantasy” in particular. In one instance, fictional novelist Crispin Hershey Humanities 2018, 7, 11 3 of 12 encounters a particularly harsh review of his (supposed) comeback book in which the critic writes, “The fantasy subplot clashes so violently with the book’s State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look.” Similarly, when Hugo Lamb contemplates how to interpret a series of strange events that befall him due to his recruitment into the ranks of the Anchorites, he labels his experiences “Plausible, if you live in a fantasy novel” (Mitchell 2014, p. 148). Although the bounds around and divisions within speculative fiction will always be fiercely contested, I agree with the novel’s description of its supernatural elements as “fantasy” rather than science fiction.1 However, for my central thesis that The Bone Clocks models the relationship to climate as one characterized by distraction, the choice of “realism” and “fantasy” as the two genres is somewhat arbitrary. The effects of climate change surround the characters, but they are distracted by a better story (as is the reader). The interrupting genre of the distraction could be fantasy, pulp science fiction, romance, mystery, or any number of other types of story. What will be important for my analysis is that this plot distracts characters from climate because it is dramatic, has clear emotional stakes, and has a straightforward course of action that the characters should pursue to achieve success.
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