David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks has become one of the talking points of the literary year, and not just because this widely-tipped novel somehow didn’t make it on to the Booker shortlist.
One of the most animated conversations revolves around Crispin Hershey, the fading “wild child of British letters” who narrates the rumbustiously satirical fourth section. Is he or is he not Martin Amis?
Hershey is a literary stylist, obsessed with the annihilation of cliche and bitter about his failure to win major prizes. His oeuvre includes the novels Red Monkey and Desiccated Embryos, for which his agent, Hal the Hyena, negotiated record advances. As the section opens he is smarting over an eviscerating review of his latest work by “a novelist of growing stature”.
Amis watchers will recall that his agent is Andrew “the Jackal” Wylie, and his novel Yellow Dog was famously damned by the novelist Tibor Fischer as “[not] bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It’s not-knowing-where-to-look bad”. Kingsley Amis is name-checked early on in the section, though Hershey’s father, ranklingly contemptuous of his son’s literary abilities, was a film director rather than a novelist: the correspondences, if such they be, are not exact.
Mitchell hotly denies that there is any connection, insisting that Desiccated Embryos is not a riff on Amis’s Dead Babies, but is borrowed from a piano suite by Eric Satie, the embryos in question belonging not to human beings but to three lesser-known sea creatures. Some of the other resonances, such as that between Red Monkey and Amis’s Yellow Dog, are harder to explain away, as Zendik pointed out in the comments under a recent Guardian profile of Mitchell.
Challenged at a recent Guardian event, Mitchell protested that Hershey was his own submerged alter ego:
“... it’s me. It’s a really ungrounded, megalomaniac me, with all my worst aspects. [Hershey] says things that I have too much tact to say. It’s the monster in the mirror … If it is an association it is subconscious. I know I can‘t have the last word on how I’m interpreted but I will have the last word on what I meant.”
Which raises two questions, both of which could belong to Mitchell’s own fictional universe. Is there, buried deep within this scrupulously polite and unassuming writer, a revenge fantasist just waiting to punish the reviewers who dismiss him as middlebrow and the Booker panels who have consistently failed to give him the gong, despite longlisting him for five of his six novels?
More interesting, perhaps, is the question of authorial intention. To what extent can we call writers to account for the fragments of real life we think we recognise in their fictional creations? It’s an issue that tends to be most furiously contested when writers feel wrongly accused of projecting themselves on to their characters. Howard Jacobson has fought a career-long battle against those who suggest his novels are full of his own literary doppelgangers, while Ian McEwan was offended enough by the suggestion that his characters shared his views to pen a stinging rebuttal in the Guardian.
So what is Mitchell playing at? Either the monster in his mirror has led him on a dangerous journey he didn’t realise he was taking (though it’s hard to believe no editor would have pointed it out to him), or he’s belatedly woken up to the fact that taking a pop at his literary elders is not necessarily the smartest career move. There would be no small irony in this, given the revenge exacted by Crispin Hershey on his critic. Or perhaps we should take Mitchell at his word and accept that this exuberant fantasist and master pasticheur is just playing.
