The early rounds of the Tournament of Books are frequently home to David-and-Goliath type match-ups. It almost seems unfair to pit one cultural behemoth against another, and kindest to let a smaller novel bow out early in a decision few would argue with.
Let's get this out of the way early--I'm going with THE BONE CLOCKS, as did the ToB, and it's the obvious choice. David Mitchell is a world-builder, and entirely up to the challenge of time-hopping, genre-defying, and perspective-switching, bringing us deep into the hearts of Holly Sykes and Hugo Lamb. (Mitchell also shares the same name as one of the best comedians of all time, my top choice in a Dinner Party with Any Five People scenario, and this can't hurt his ToB chances.) The story is divided up into sections that each take place roughly ten years ahead of the previous, and the strongest of these by far are the first and last, narrated by Holly. Other reviews have pointed out that some sections drag--I'm least partial to "Crispin Hershey's Lonely Planet", the section supposed to be a parody of Martin Amis--but the same was true of CLOUD ATLAS, and Mitchell has the good sense to bookend the story with tales of survival and family that leave a lasting impression. We don't have to believe in, or fully understand, the struggle of the horologists to recognize the trope of a secret society preying on young children as sacrifices. In certain sections, the horologists and the anchorites remind me of characters from A WRINKLE IN TIME or THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH, in the way that their struggle is understandable in broad strokes. This is not a nuanced portrayal of evil; Hugo Lamb rather clearly sells his soul for power, and in doing so distinguishes himself from Holly, who wears her honesty like a uniform: with equal parts resentment and pride. Holly shows over and over that she will sacrifice herself for a child, for a family member, and for the outcasts, which makes her as neat a heroine as any commonly found in battle against time-traveling warlocks.
I'm going to describe the basic plot of ADAM to you, and let you judge for yourself whether it's a progressive or regressive novel. Adam is a rising high school senior is losing touch with his group of friends, and arranges to spend the summer in New York City with his lesbian older sister Casey. Upon meeting her and her friends, who all fall somewhere along the queer spectrum, Adam is introduced to a culture about which he has been equally curious and apprehensive since discovering his sister's orientation. After deciding that this summer he will find a redheaded girlfriend, Adam runs into a girl who meets his specifications at a party, and allows her to continue in the mistaken assumption that he is trans and 22, rather than potentially quash their nascent attraction. This lie of omission grows and continues to haunt Adam as their relationship progresses, until one night on the shores of a Michigan lake, Adam reveals to his girlfriend his true gender and age, and is completely accepted, although she has previously stated unequivocally that she would never date a cis man. Their relationship continues partway through Adam's return to California and his last year of high school, before ending in a manner common to the long-distance relationships of the young: their skype chats become a chore, and eventually she starts seeing a coworker (another cis man, it is worth noting).
Now, of course this traffics in some of the most unrealistic and pernicious assumptions about lesbians made by any straight man--that their orientation is somehow more fungible than that of straight men, that their choices and stated preferences are not absolute, and that cis men can easily pass for trans men (although in the novel each trans man's ability to pass is commented upon at length and in one case serves as a late twist that really adds nothing to the story.) It's unclear how much of these assumptions we're supposed to attribute to the author and how much to Adam, who does embody a lot of the prejudices and ignorance of a straight teenage boy confronted with gay and trans people in the flesh for the first time.
The story raises some dark issues that it skirts around (the ethicality of having sex with someone to whom you have lied about your age; the obsessive and stalker-like behavior of Ethan toward his ex-girlfriend Rachel; Casey's possibly abusive relationship with Hazel, a confusingly-motivated dominatrix and trans woman who she meets on the internet; Rachel's addiction to prescription pain-killers and Ethan's unsuccessful attempts to convince her to get treatment; some throwaway anti-Semitism centered on an unresponsive Hasidic landlord). Bringing up an array of dysfunction while avoiding realistic consequences is common in my experience with YA fiction, but the reader also expects a nod to negative outcomes that never arrives. Casey is certainly tossed around by the winds of fate and never seems to experience a happy relationship (and neither do most of the queer characters, significantly) but Adam gets the authorial pass to imagine negative consequences at every turn (his girlfriend breaking off all contact with him, a passing group of street toughs beating him up, being ridiculed by his friends or by Ethan) while never facing them. It ends up being unsatisfying, because Adam is certainly not a hero, and often makes immoral choices, notwithstanding his dithering over them. His behavior is hard to explain; he reads up extensively on trans issues but fails to notice the major issues of consent in his treatment of his girlfriend, and he experiences very disturbing dissociative anxiety attacks but is pretty blase about his girlfriend's confessed depression. When it comes to deciding between a fantastical story with a clear and admirable hero, and a realistically-based portrayal of teen angst told from the point of view of a sometime-scumbag, it's not too hard to choose the forces of good.
My winner and ToB's: THE BONE CLOCKS
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