Michael's Reviews > Black Swan Green

This warm and big-hearted coming-of-age tale of a 13-year old boy, Jason Taylor, set in rural south central England in the early 80’s has plenty of charm. It’s sweet, but not sappy. Its magic lies in the capturing of innocence of that age at that time and place, from the electricity of a first kiss and sickness from a first cigarette to the pull of dancing to the Talking Heads and of jingoistic feelings inspired by Maggie Thatcher’s war for the Falkland Islands. The dark side of things in this story are pretty mild. Mitchell isn’t going for the drama of surviving that typically anguished period of life, the twisted impacts of a dysfunctional family, or a satirical expose of the British middle class. Instead, the overall effect of my read is a sense of adventure and empathy for this boy at the cusp between the handicaps of naivete and confidence of adult sensibilities.

We do get the typical challenges of bullies and cliques at school. And the dawning of knowledge that his parents are hiding troubles in their marriage. The sad truth that his government can lie about the dangers and purposes of the war and that boys he knows can die needlessly there. And that sex may not be all it’s cracked up to be. But the overwhelming challenge for Jason is his stammer. His brave struggle to deal with fears of ridicule and feelings of shame is wonderfully portrayed. He personifies the problem as the “Hangman”, always waiting to catch him. He hasn’t seen the movie we have, “The King’s Speech”. He can’t imagine want job he might hold which would not require speaking:

Being trapped in a monestary’d be murder. How about a lighthouse keeper? All those storms, sunsets, and Dairylea sandwiches’d make you lonely in the end. But lonely is something I’d better get used to. What girl’s go out with a stammerer? Or even dance with one? The last song at the Black Swan Green Village Hall Disco’s be over before I could spit out D-d-d-you want to d-d-d-d-d-dance. Or what if I stammered at my wedding and couldn’t even say “I do”?

We root for him to get past all these hurdles and know that he will. It becomes evident that Jason’s inner voice is too strong for him to fail. It spills out into secret poetry he submits under a pseudonym for the parish newsletter, and he continually harnesses his poetic ways of looking at the world through metaphors, myths, and hyperbole. The structure of the book is of thirteen chapters for thirteen months, each of which is like a short story on a theme. In each case, we see him growing up a little more before our eyes. In one chapter, he gets some brief tutoring on life and his poetic aspirations from an ancient Belgian émigré, Eva. He confesses to keeping his writing secret because he doesn’t want to be considered gay. She nails him with: “You are afraid the hairy barbarians will not accept you into your tribe if you write poetry.” Though Mitchell leans mostly toward simple realism,, he periodically infuses some welcome comic relief, as here in this exchange with Eva:

“…what are the writers you revere most greatly?”
“Oh.” I mentally scanned my bookshelf for the really impressive names. “Isaac Asimov. Ursula Le Guin. John Wyndham.”
“Assy-smurf? Ursular Gun? Wind-‘em? These are modern poets?”
“No. Sci-fi, fantasy. Stephen King, too. He’s horror.”
“ ‘Fantasy’? Pfffft! Listen to Ronald Reagan’s homilies! ‘Horror’? What of Vietnam, Afganistan, South Africa? Idi Amin, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot? Is not enough horror? I mean, who are your masters? Chekhov?”
“Er …no.”
“But you have read Madame Bovary?”
(I’d never heard of her books.) “No.”
Each name climbed up the octave. “Hermann Hesse?”
“No.” Unwisely, I tried to dampen Madame Crommelynck’s disgust. “We don’t really do Europeans at school ---“
“ ‘Europeans’? England is now drifted to the Caribbean? Are you African? Antarctican? You are European, you illiterate monkey of puberty! …”

Another of the chapters treads a little along the lines of a boy-level parody of mythic adventures and quests in the woods of the Malvern Hills. But it’s not far from the fantasy games and challenges we got up to in my rural youth decades earlier. Have a sample of the spooky poetry Jason’s mind comes up with (a case where purple patch has a good excuse):
Squeezing through a missing slat in a mossy fence, we found ourselves at the bottom of lumpy lawn. Molehills mounted up here and there. A big, silent mansion with turret things watched us from the top of the slope. A peardrop sun dissolved in a sloped pond. Superheated flies grandprixed over the water. Trees at the height of their blossom bubbled dark cream by a rotted bandstand.

I admit I was a little disappointed not to have another advance in the art of the novel along the lines of “Cloud Atlas”, but I got over that attitude. In a great 2010 interview in “The Paris Review”, Mitchell explained:
After doing a half Chinese-box, half Russian-doll sort of a novel, I wanted to see if I could write a compelling book about an outwardly unremarkable boy stuck in an outwardly unremarkable time and place without any jiggery-pokery, without fireworks—just old-school..

I refer the curious reader to the same interview to learn how much this novel is autobiographical, and why the interviewer was led to remark: “It was perverse of you to write a first novel after having written three others.”