Extracting the Ultradeep Oil: David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks

Abstract

ABSTRACT David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks reworks the novel form with its generic experimentation, a gesture in response to the transformed geosocial contours of the Anthropocene. Straddling between the realist and the fantastical, the novel decentralizes human perspective that proves increasingly unsatisfactory to confront the complex causality of climate change for imaginative and conceptual limits. In this essay, I argue that Mitchell attends to a conceptual limit imposed by petroculture, one that refuses to connect the future warming climate with the present large-scale combustion of fossil fuels. The temporal disjunction evolves into a strong antagonism between present and future, which can be tellingly revealed by the coupling of realist and fantastical traditions. Mitchell’s genre-blending device therefore pushes the novel form beyond its usual near-sightedness, excavating a deeper layer of climate-induced crisis of human imagination, namely the present’s inability to recognize the delayed effects of its unsustainable consumption pattern. Viewed through an energy-oriented perspective, The Bone Clocks engages with modernity’s ultradeep relationship with oil, complicating our understanding of climate temporality that matters in terms of intergenerational justice.