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Every
now and then, books are released that people want to love
before they read them. David Mitchell's fourth novel, Black
Swan Green, received just the amount of low-key over-hype
that proffered on-cover blurbs and award nominations long
before the book attempted to become the biggest community
read in the summer of 2006. Despite the fanfare, the book
is more of a laborious walk through adolescence than a collective
book-that-fulfilled-the-hype sigh of relief.
The book
follows 13-year-old Jason Taylor over the course of a year
in the early 1980s—a chapter for each passing month.
From the beginning, Mitchell, who voices Jason (a la J.D.
Salinger's Holden Caulfield), is almost too obvious in his
attempt to create mystery with nondisclosure: Jason is forbidden
to answer the telephone in his father's office, though it
rings without end, and he is stricken with a stammer, though
readers are also privy to his non-stammering, stream-of-consciousness
thoughts. Instead of finding mystery, readers are just left
out. Call it a creative plot twist, but when readers finally
discover why Jason is barred from that specific phone, it
no longer seems of any significant import.
Jason
also has a modest and appropriate passion for poetry, disgruntled
and indifferent parents, and an unpleasant older sister who
seems to make Jason's 13 feel like 23. When Jason muses, "Magnets
don't need to understand magnetism" and later, "Listening
to houses breathe makes you weightless," the impression isn't
that the child-poet is indeed as perceptive and insightful
as his flowery prose attempts to show, but that someone is
trying to make readers think so. Mitchell has probably already
discovered that there is a big difference in writing about
adolescence and writing in the midst of it—something
always gets lost in translation.
In his
previous efforts—number9Dream, Cloud Atlas,
and Ghostwritten—Mitchell created fantasy-like
alter realms with multiple characters and layers of complicated
fiction. In Black Swan Green, the focus settles on
one character and the long, slow slide into adolescence. Mitchell
succeeds in his ability to transport readers into Jason's
mind—we are with him as he scales a large tree, inadvertently
becoming an audience to a couple of elder schoolmates' make-out
session, and we are with him as he trails the thin line between
popular and outcast. Mitchell allows himself a good deal of
creative freedom but seems to expend it more on recreating
the Falkland War period of the early 1980s than on telling
Jason's story.
Not unlike
his previous work, Black Swan Green reads like a series
of interrelated short stories. A reader expecting a fluid
plotline will be sadly disappointed when the month wraps and
Mitchell never addresses events again. Mitchell makes this
novel interesting for readers of his previous books, however—Madame
Commelynck, the mysterious and silent purveyor of Jason's
adolescent poetry, is also referenced in Cloud Atlas,
while Neal Brose, Jason's classmate, appears in Ghostwritten.
It's an interesting inclusion that rarely happens among prominent
authors but only enhances the telling of the story. Though
arguably insignificant characters, they add that extra bit
of cross-literary interest where otherwise Black Swan Green
begins to sag.
Black
Swan Green is supposed to be a quaint coming-of-age story
and, for the most part, it is. The chronological journey through
Jason's thirteenth year includes meditations on life in junior
high as a stutterer and the epic attempt to fit in with the
popular boys, as well as his parents' relationship and inevitable
divorce. It's a nice piecemeal story but lacks the organization
of a collection of short stories and the cohesiveness and
plotline of a typical novel. While interesting in parts, Mitchell
treads on unsteady ground as Jason's storyteller and the end
result is a chore to get through.
(January,
2008)
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