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Some
look back on their early adolescence with nostalgia, while
others would rather forget the awkward stops and starts along
the bumpy road to adulthood. Jason Taylor, narrator of David
Mitchell's Black Swan Green, reveals a life that is
the source of both: he is a 13-year old would-be poet navigating
through one tragicomic year in his young life.
Each
of the 13 chapters in the novel chronicles a different month,
with each centered on those moments in childhood that many
believe will mark (or scar) them forever. In Jason, Mitchell
has conjured one of the most memorable and real narrators
in recent literature; he reflects on girls, his parents' disintegrating
marriage, the cruel initiations of adolescence, and the home
front experience of the Falkland Wars with equal pathos.
Black
Swan Green takes place in a small English countryside
town in 1982, and the book is flavored with Thatcher politics,
British vernacular, and early '80s pop music. Unlike Mitchell's
earlier novels, Black Swan Green is, in many ways,
a novel about the pains and pleasures of the ordinary, and
Jason scrutinizes the everyday with as much perception as
he does major life events. Thirteen is an age where an embarrassment
at school or a fight with one's parents takes on epic proportions,
and yet time passes in such a way that last month's tragedies
seem to fade into the distant past. Mitchell conjures this
sense with such ease that Jason is a completely believable
character, even as his thoughts reveal a remarkable sophistication.
In Cloud
Atlas, Mitchell showed himself to be a master of the narrative
voice, and in Black Swan Green, he exceeds all expectations.
Instead of writing what could have been an angst-ridden, self-fixated
modern Holden Caulfield, Mitchell brings Jason out of himself
with a well-rendered cast of supporting characters: his distant,
workaholic father; his acidic mother; the merciless bullies
at school; his fellow outcast friends; and various colorful
townsfolk. These interactions are human and familiar, even
as they take on the larger-than-life significance of Jason's
childhood myth building.
Just
as significant but more subtle are the internal characters
that populate Jason's mind, including Unborn Twin (the voice
of self-deprecation and fear) and his omnipresent arch-nemesis,
the Hangman, who is the embodiment of Jason's stammer that
often leaves "s" words frozen on his tongue. Mitchell uses
these devices to drive Jason's internal dialog and reveal
a more developed character as Jason responds to disappointment,
embarrassment, and fear, without devolving into pithy, trite,
or gimmicky narration.
Mitchell's
writing is gorgeous, and Jason's insights are by turns comic
and heartbreaking. Black Swan Green is perhaps Mitchell's
most autobiographic novel, and it certainly feels like the
most grounded. Rather than producing another quaint coming
of age tale, Mitchell delivers a subtle and masterful rendering
of an age that is difficult to capture. Black Swan Green
is not a young adult novel, in spite of the age of the narrator,
in part because Mitchell made obvious choices to speak to
an adult audience. Like Holden Caulfield, Jason may or may
not be a completely honest narrator, though more because the
epic events of childhood are skewed both by the narrow perspective
of youth (Jason's) and the broader perspective of adulthood
(Mitchell's, and our own). Jason may seem wiser than his years,
but Mitchell tempers that wisdom by using Jason's own voice
to communicate it (he says, "the world's a headmaster who
looks at your faults"). In a way, Jason is the version of
our younger selves that we believe will remain when we're
adults, to remind us of the wrongdoings and mistakes of grown-ups
so that we may never repeat them. Inevitably, we forget, but
Mitchell has done a marvelous job of jogging our memory.
(January,
2008)
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