The world at 13

Black Swan Green
by David Mitchell
Sceptre, 373 pages
Available at Fully Booked
The problem with being David Mitchell is that you’ve set standards that are so high, your latest work will always be compared with your previous novels. For those who have been living in the literary wilderness, Mitchell is the British author of three highly acclaimed novels – Ghostwritten, number9dream, and Cloud Atlas. He’s been shortlisted for the MAN Booker twice now; and Cloud Atlas alone, copped the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the South Bank Show Literature Prize, and won for Best Literary Fiction at last year’s British Book Awards. Don’t be surprised if his latest, Black Swan Green, turns out to be both critically praised, and his most popular yet.

With these three novels, there was a recurring literary device of utilizing various voices as narrators, having open-ended vignettes work as chapters of the book, and the violation of standard spatial and temporal dimensions in order to create the semblance of interconnectedness between characters and stories. A character from one timeline would suddenly pop up in a story that had nothing to do with the original story where we met this character. Concepts such as synchronicity and serendipity would abound within the pages – all adding to the sheer reading delight we would experience as we wrapped ourselves around his gems of a novel. It was like watching literary juggling, and we’d be open-mouthed, wondering if he could really manage to pull it off, or end up dropping the balls.

With Black Swan Green ("green" referring to the area of grassland that’s found in the center of a village), there is a more conventional framework buttressing the novel. It’s 13 months in the life of your average 13-year-old English schoolchild, Jason Taylor, who happens to be a stammerer. With strong autobiographical elements (Mitchell did stammer as a child), the concept of open-ended chapters still exists here; but rather than jumping around in time and space, Mitchell sticks to a much more linear treatment. This open-ended device still works because it gives the impression that no matter how life-transforming or important the incidents or lessons may be, the reality is that they’re all a succession of just-another-day.

One of the unique qualities of this novel is Mitchell providing us with an English countryside/pastoral version of magical realism. There’s no other way to describe it, as the co-mingling of your day-to-day with the seemingly fantastic and dreamlike, as triggered by a 13-year old’s fertile imagination, is akin to magical realism Western-style. The setting is naturally a school, much like any of the typical grammar schools we’d find in England in the 1980s. But it’s how simple things like a lonely cottage and its inhabitants by the local pond, or the ill-tempered watchdog of a local mean character, all take on mythical proportions, and enter the annals of local folklore in the eyes and pen of Jason.

In Jason’s life, we encounter bullies, school high-jinks and your typical obsessions, the stirrings of sexual awareness, and the desire for acceptance and camaraderie. Jason gripes about how, while sex is taught in school, no one prepares you for the intensity of desire, and the frustration and pain that ensue. Because he stammers, Jason is constantly singled out and picked on. As he remarks, it’s "easier to change your eyeballs than to change your nickname." His secret outlet is writing poems under the name of Eliot Bolivar, and having the poems printed in the local church publication. While these 13 months chug along, there are all sorts of things impinging on his perception of life and growing up. The Falklands crisis is occurring at this time, and the connection that’s created between Jason and the crisis is that a local boy, who Jason had espied making out with his girlfriend, is a casualty of the conflict. There’s the domestic crisis that is also taking place with Jason’s parents’ relationship coming apart at the seams. As Jason poignantly declares, "Picked-on kids act invisible to reduce the chances of being noticed and picked on. Stammerers act invisible to reduce the chances of being made to say something we can’t. Kids whose parents argue act invisible in case we trigger another skirmish. The Triple Invisible Boy, that’s Jason Taylor."

And when the split does come about and elder sister, Julia, ends up living with their mother, the metaphor Jason utilizes is half-funny and full-sad: "This divorce’s like in a disaster film when a crack zigzags along the street and a chasm opens up under someone’s feet. I’m that someone. Mum’s on one side with Julia, Dad’s on the other with Cynthia. If I don’t jump one way or the other, I’m going to fall into bottomless blackness." Cynthia being the father’s girlfriend.

The particular pleasure I found in reading Black Swan Green was in the manner Mitchell really managed to marry the subtle and poetic, with the gritty and profane. The book remains very true and real, while taking on flights of extreme fancy. As the book closes, Jason and his sister have the following exchange, one that gives hope its due, something so important to a 13-year old who has to now take life so seriously: "It’ll be all right in the end, Jace." "It doesn’t feel very all right." "That’s because it’s not the end." They’re really simple words, but placed in the context of how Mitchell uses them, they become part of the literary magic Mitchell once again weaves over us, his enthralled readers.