After reading Clade, bone clocks felt like whiplash. It had almost exactly the opposite problems.

Mitchell writes scenes, characters and moment to moment tension wonderfully, but his philosophy and structure were off the rails major time. For bone clocks to be 620 pages long, and only 300 pages having been relevant to the plot is a major yikes. Like why spend 100 pages in the head of a irrelevant war journalist, like what?

But, as I said, the war journalist character himself and his arc were really engaging, even though irrelevant.

In clade, I didn’t care at all about the character and the narrative rushed wayyy to fast by everything. It’s amazing how they literally had opposite problems.

Bone clocks having magnitudes of popularity more than clade though reinforces the ‘readers only care about characters’ mantra as well

The climate dystopia at the end is an example of the social collapse in a post apocalyptic section. Mitchell believed that without Society and with too few resources, humanity will turn to a state of kill or be killed barbarism. This is references a few times, particularly how across Europe gangs have taken control and a psydo feudal system re-emerges based upon survival of the fittest