The Bone Clocks asks whether a person can affect large world events.

Despite her participation in the decisive Second Mission, Holly Sykes hardly exerts any influence on the war between Horology and the Anchorites: She is not a major player like Marinus, or even Hugo Lamb, and the conflict will always continue—as Marinus learns in Mitchell’s 2015 novel Slade House. Holly’s minimal role in this war parallels her experience of history. After all, the secret Atemporal war mirrors many of the real and speculative world events that Mitchell references throughout the novel, from the 1984 British miners’ strike, to the Iraq War, to the Endarkenment. Holly starts the novel with the self-assurance that she is in control of her destiny, setting out from Gravesend in 1984 to live on her own. But the more she learns about the wider world, the less powerful she feels. During the final part of the novel, Holly is at her most helpless, caught in a moment of extraordinary crisis: The Chinese military withdraws from Ireland, a chaotic militia invades her village, the supply of insulin Holly’s adoptive grandson, Rafiq, needs to survive is threatened, and her granddaughter Lorelei faces the possibility of an arranged marriage to a warlord.