The Bone Clocks

Marinus is a secondary character and one of five narrators in The Bone Clocks. As an Atemporal, he is affected differently by the cycles of time and death: Marinus’s soul can reincarnate in other bodies, usually those of dying children. As such, like other Atemporals, Marinus has lived for hundreds of years across bodies with different gender identities. Marinus also has access to a number of psychic abilities, allowing him to inhabit and control bodies, persuade people to do his bidding, and engage in psychic conversation.

The novel explores the broader history of Marinus’s soul, which he refers to as a meta-life. After dying in 18th century Japan as Dr. Marinus (in David Mitchell’s 2010 novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), Marinus was reincarnated as Klara Marinus Koskov, a Russian peasant girl born toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century. Marinus retains certain skills across incarnations, which have allowed him to easily ascend in social status—something he implies to have done several times throughout his meta-life. As Klara, Marinus learned about Horology and his Atemporal nature for the first time, having been found by Xi Lo and Holokai, Horology’s founders. Toward the end of the same century, as Pablo Antay Marinus, he traveled to Western Australia, where he met Esther Little, the oldest of the Horologists, for the first time.

In The Bone Clocks, Dr. Marinus helps Holly’s with the voices she hears and with her seeming hallucination of a sinister woman known as Miss Constantin. Recognizing Constantin as one of the Anchorites, Marinus represses Holly’s psychic powers to save her from the Anchorites. Holly meets Marinus again many years later when Marinus inhabits the body of Dr. Iris Fenby. As Fenby, Marinus explains the War between Horology and the Anchorites to Holly and retrieves Esther Little from asylum in Holly’s memory. When Fenby is killed during the Second Mission, Marinus enters Holly’s mind, but relinquishes control when Holly recognizes the labyrinth that Jacko had drawn for her as the escape route they need to follow. Marinus allows Holly to use the golden apple to flee the collapsing Anchorite chapel. He returns as Harry Veracruz, an adviser to the president of Iceland, and grants Holly’s request to bring Lorelei and Rafiq to a safe haven.

Hugo Lamb is an antagonist in The Bone Clocks and one of the novel’s narrators. He first appears in Part 2 of the novel, introduced as a hedonistic Cambridge student with few morals: He sexually pursues the girlfriend of a classmate, breaks up with another partner because he is ashamed to introduce her—an immigrant nurse—to his striver family, steals a valuable set of stamps from a war veteran, and swindles another classmate out of his luxury car. When the classmate dies by suicide under pressure to fulfill the terms of the grift, Hugo only laments the lost financial opportunity.

Hugo’s amorality is linked to his social status. Unlike his classmates, who all come from rich or noble English families, Hugo comes from a less elevated background, forcing him to perform office work for a solicitor. At one point, Hugo considers what it means to beat England’s entrenched class system—for him, the answer is capitalism. A cynic, he doesn’t believe in altruism or idealism; in his experience, even those people who claim to be above material desires are just as motivated by greed as he is (for example, a woman he once slept with who claimed to have transcended the need for money, ended up asking him for some). Hugo is also characterized as cold and unfeeling, claiming to his friends that he has never experienced love and he is, furthermore, immune to it. All of these beliefs and personality traits make him an ideal candidate to join the Anchorites, whose vampiric existence is predicated on the sociopathic conviction that they are superior to mortal humans.

Hugo has a chance to redeem himself when he meets Holly, whose rejections of his advances cause him to get to know her as a person and fall in love with her. However, his fear for the consequences of his crimes is stronger than his budding emotional attachment to Holly; offered the powers of the Anchorites, he quickly accepts and spends the next 30 years working for the evil Pfenninger and Blind Cathar. After his superiors are destroyed during the Second Mission, Hugo has another moment of potential redemption: He finds the golden soul apple that would allow him to escape the collapsing Anchorite chapel but gives it to Holly, leaving readers wondering if she ever loved him back.

Ed Brubeck is the primary romantic interest of Holly Sykes and one of the novel’s narrators. Introduced as an outsider at Holly’s school, Ed proves to be helpful when she runs away from home: He helps Holly to find shelter at a nearby church, gives her the idea to work at a nearby fruit farm, and finally helps her to return home after Jacko disappears. Ed’s primary aspiration as a teen is to travel across Europe, foreshadowing his future work as a journalist.

In Part 3, the adult Ed, who is in a committed relationship with Holly, is a war correspondent in the Middle East addicted to the thrill of chasing stories. When his firsthand experiences prompt Holly’s relatives to ask uninformed questions about the occupation, Ed is disgusted by their fascination and lack of knowledge. He also feels guilt over his privilege as a British citizen, and his indirectly involvement in the deaths of two Iraqis, Nasser and Aziz. Ed’s addiction to his work causes him to forego opportunities to be with his family, extending his stay in Iraq instead of transitioning to life in London with Holly and their daughter, Aoife, and accepting an interview in Cairo on the same day as Aoife’s school play.

While trying to convince Holly to write about her psychic experiences, Ed opens up about his addiction to work and confesses his guilt over the fates of Nasser and Aziz. Although the novel indicates that he makes an effort to be more present for his family, Ed is later revealed to have been killed by a missile in Syria in 2009.