On the surface there doesn’t seem to be much connection between the work of David Mitchell and that of Flannery O’Connor. Yet as I meander my way through Mitchell’s new novel, The Bone Clocks (no spoilers, please, I’m not finished yet), I keep thinking of what O’Connor says in her essay, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”:

“Hawthorne knew his own problems and perhaps anticipated ours when he said he did not write novels, he wrote romances.”

According to O’Connor, by writing romances Hawthorne “was trying to keep for fiction some of its freedom from social determinisms, and steer it in the direction of poetry.”

Is this what Mitchell is doing with the jarring interjections of camp Dr. Who sci-fi that disrupt the otherwise up-market narrative style of The Bone Clocks? Is he, in his own fashion, attempting to break free from the social determinisms that typically serve as the backdrop of contemporary literary fiction and indicate something of the mystery of human existence?

“What if…what if heaven is real, but only in moments?” wonders one of Mitchell’s protagonists, a 15 year-old sexually promiscuous girl who has run away from home after an argument with her mother.

“S’pose heaven’s not like a painting that’s just hanging there forever, but more like…the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you catch in snatches, while you’re alive, from passing cars, or…upstairs windows when you’re lost…”

Perhaps the space opera that will, I gather, eventually take center stage in The Bone Clocks will somehow help gather up the snatches of this song. Or otherwise signal a depth to reality too often missing in the realisms of literary fiction. Perhaps.

We’ll have to see.