David Mitchell's brilliant new novel, The Bone Clocks, spans roughly sixty years, half of them spent (1984 to the present), half not (the present to 2043). Sure, its characters—many of them the heirs or exploiters or prey of a secret loophole in mortality—strain that timeline. And, thanks to their incredibly long memories, centuries lapse in the course of their flashbacks. Then again, The Bone Clocks's chronological glitches are nothing compared to its prodigal geography. Its characters hurtle unimpeded between the known continents. As well as past them.

They visit, specifically, secret principalities—realms that exist alongside the world as we know it and in which two clans of "atemporals" (beings able to put off death) are at war, most pointedly over the worth of "temporal" lives. The nobler clan, Horology, has been granted their approximate immortality unbidden (by what deity or accident they don't know). The Anchorites, conversely, wrest deathlessness to themselves. When the tribes clash, though, their ferocity impinges upon and smudges ordinary mortals' ongoing stories.

So the atemporals do work together to do one thing. They conspire to smuggle the paranormal into an otherwise realistic fiction. Standing behind them, of course, is Mitchell, who, as his fans already know, has an uncanny knack for at once perfecting and flouting the rules of genre. This knack shows up even in the tiniest details of The Bone Clocks. Take the pastoral lyricism that Mitchell infuses with technological jargon, describing "brand-new leaves ooz[ing] unbundling from swollen buds and a wood …. Bluetoothed with birdsong." On a larger scale, meanwhile, one section of this novel begins by standing exquisitely in line with a shelf's worth of other Oxbridge bildungsromans only so that Mitchell can marry it to fantasy.

Its diverting snags and postmodern play notwithstanding, The Bone Clocks begins and ends with one character, Holly Sykes, and her story holds this narrative together. Indeed, the novel opens with her chronicling "A Hot Spell" in her adolescence: a rash entanglement with a used car salesman and its unthinkable aftermath. It closes with her septuagenarian voice: practical, wry, and unflappable except when her loved ones suffer.

Granted, five books lie between the first and last sections of The Bone Clocks—and each is narrated by a character other than Holly. Mitchell, moreover, swivels so boldly in the gaps between these books that Holly, who runs away from home in the book's first pages, goes missing habitually in this narrative. In book three, for instance, she's papered over by a war reporter's story; in book four, by the bitter discourse of a novelist whose popularity is on the wane. She disappears for pages at a time. But always reappears—silhouetted against the snow or holding a crowd in thrall or alone in a churchyard—making this cubist panorama of a fiction compelling for the simplest reason: we look for her, we pull for her.

The Bone Clocks, then, seems to nudge its reader in two directions. On the one hand, it passes down to its readers what a beggar in its second book demands of posh, pretty Hugo Lamb. "Think larger," the panhandler tells him. "Re-draw what is possible." Hugo, for his part, finds the directive hard to resist or to obey, hard to sound, hard to silence. Read this novel, and you will, too.

On the other hand, for all its cerebral virtuosity—for, that is, every time a character from one of Mitchell's previous novels puts in a winking cameo, for every arcane history the writer crams into an aside, for every wry allusion it deploys—this is first and last a book about conscience. It is a book about cunning and compassion. It is a book about the mortal Holly Sykes, who has both.

In short, Mitchell does not exact quite as much from his readers as intrepid beggars do from his characters. Like his debut fiction, Ghostwritten, and the film-adapted Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks commands its audience, primarily, not to "think larger" but to imagine passionately along with its own fiction's largess. And if you read this novel with a pencil in hand, your task will not be to "re-draw what is possible." Mitchell has beat you to that. Rather, your task will be to rough out his plot's incredible genealogy on the book's back matter. Your task will be to decorate his story's margins with whatever idiosyncratic shorthand you use to signal perplexity and epiphany, to flag outlandish allusions and inside jokes, to single out the author's own drawing at its best.

None of that is bad. Indeed, I don't read David Mitchell's novels because I need him to enjoin me to "think larger" than he thinks (I can't) or to scrap the half-possible worlds he conjures and start sketching (I oughtn't). Rather, I read Mitchell's novels because their cunning isn't tiring and their charity isn't condescending, and we do need more books like that.

Why? Because, too often, smart writing is also hard enough going that the only readers whom it rewards with truths about conscience and compassion are those who belong to a literary élite, and this is a problem for two reasons. 1. Literary élites tend to congratulate themselves for their expertise as they read, which makes it easy to miss the real prize: truth, artfully dressed. 2. Lay-readers tend to be put off when what they thought would be a story is instead the transcript of the literati whispering shibboleths back and forth.

Let me be clear. I'm not saying that writers should gag their wit or that readers attuned to writers' witticisms should deny themselves glee. That would be hypocritical of me, as I smilingly dog-eared a page of The Bone Clocks for no other reason than that it contained a droll, willfully cumbersome riff on William Blake (viz., "What immortal hand or eye could frame these charted miles, welded girders, inhabited sidewalks and more bricks than there are stars?"). What I'm saying is that smart writers sometimes permit the élite wit they can call up to supplant, at worst, or, at best, to limit the circulation of whatever truths they would champion.

David Mitchell doesn't number among them. He doesn't allow his virtuosity to trump the case he makes for virtue. Which is why it's the readers who scrutinize his fiction only for its wit (or evidence of their own)—not the readers who fail to notice his erudite showmanship—who will miss out on what The Bone Clocks offers.

Put otherwise: the accusation that a 22-year-old Holly levels at one of this book's cleverest characters trumps what an enigmatic vagrant commands him on the order of "thinking larger." For when Holly accuses Hugo Lamb of "sifting what [people] say for clues instead of listening," she's also remonstrating with those who sift through books for clues instead of reading, and the novel Mitchell's put her in backs her. You could come to The Bone Clocks with very little literary cunning and still find its story compelling and its morality legible.

The stunning thing about David Mitchell, however, is that you could also come to this novel impatient with simplistic moralizing or sentimental drivel or donnish condescension and not find it wanting. Admittedly, parts of The Bone Clocks—especially its rendering of the future—flirt with portentousness, in both senses of that word, but nowhere does Mitchell dole out moral pablum. On the contrary, even his axioms are frowzy (e.g., "Civilization's like the economy, or Tinkerbell: If people stop believing it's real, it dies"). And it's possible that, given time, this novel's last hundred pages or so will smack more of prescience than portentousness.

Whether 2043 bears any likeness to the last book of The Bone Clocks, however, is trivia next to Mitchell's deeper thesis. Here it is: as the years elapse, we need to tug cunning and compassion and conscience along with us, and an unlikely story makes a good rucksack for those things.

Furthermore, apart from cunning and compassion and conscience, the world will only produce likely stories, stories that proceed according to the flat templates of genre. So that to reduce another person's sadness into cliché will prove easy, as in "cue crying scene: a scene as old as hominids and tear glands. It's happening all over Planet Earth, right now, in all the languages there are." And evil regimes will issue edicts using the same old mad-lib in which "treason, under Clause Whatever of the Stability Law Act of Whenever, would be dealt with by a bullet through the head."

"The world's default mode is basic indifference," says The Bone Clocks's third narrator. Then he insists that what "is written about [reality] at least makes a tiny dent in the world's memory," and that such dents vex indifference, even if they cannot derail it. By the same token, true fictions at least make a tiny dent in the world's imagination. Fair enough—but in my imagination, Mitchell's novels have left craters and foxholes, and I cannot tell the two apart.

Jane Zwart teaches writing and literature at Calvin College.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.