Books: Bogged down in over-ploughed ground

David Mitchell brings out the familiar names for his readers in The Bone Clocks. Photo / Paul Stuart

And now, for his adoring fans, David Mitchell plays the hits. You want a rebellious, naive but clever British teen from the early Thatcher years, like the one he wrote about in Black Swan Green? Perhaps a cynical aging novelist to match the cynical aging publisher in Cloud Atlas? Or maybe a sardonic young student in the vein of the amoral young composer in Cloud Atlas.

Mitchell has always recycled his characters and all his novels feature recurring faces from one or more of the others. These links are grace notes, gentle winks to fans; you don't need to know about them, because they don't bind the books together in any terribly important way.

The Bone Clocks, his latest, has more familiar names on its cast list than any of its predecessors, which irritated me slightly - grace notes are all very well until they start drowning out the tune - but the book's real problem lies with its new characters, because they don't feel new.

Mitchell's novels are always episodic. Black Swan Green, the least overtly adventurous of them structurally, still has the unusual property of being modular: you could publish each of its chapters, except for the finale, as a stand-alone short story.

The Bone Clocks has the same basic structure as Ghostwritten, his first novel, and Cloud Atlas, his third, is a series of novellas, each narrated by a different character. The rebellious teen, the aging novelist, and the sardonic student are three of them, and their voices feel dismayingly familiar - Mitchell is returning to over-ploughed ground.

Then there's the body-hopping immortal, so similar to the one in Ghostwritten, and his fearsome soul-devouring enemies, strongly reminiscent of the evil Oriental abbot in The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet, which has just lost the distinction of being the only work of Mitchell's I dislike. The secret war between the good immortals and the evil ones is the most "daring" of the book's sub-plots, cropping up in glittering glimpses in chapter after chapter, suggesting that this work of seeming realism is building towards some sort of grand science fiction set piece.

Then we meet the immortals properly, and they turn out to be refugees from the bad old genre fiction of the 1950s, solemnly plotting to "psycho-demolish" their enemies by "psycho-detonating" someone's soul.

It's shocking to see a writer as energetic and original as Mitchell resorting to these sorts of ham-fisted neologisms. But there is a larger problem with the war of the immortals, and also with the far more effective piece of science fiction speculation which crops up in the final chapter. It's a problem of scale.

Cloud Atlas - of all Mitchell's novels, the one The Bone Clocks most resembles - manages to contemplate the collapse of civilisation over centuries in a way which does not devalue the small concerns and private troubles of its characters.

On the other hand, the individual human stories which comprise The Bone Clocks seem irrelevant to the book's larger concerns. Perhaps the reason Mitchell's characters feel like tired echoes of his older creations is that they lack an organic relationship to the book in which they're embedded.

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (Sceptre $37.99).