The Book Tower

Our room looked over roofs down to where this funny quay crooks into the sea. Gulls dived and screamed like Spitfires and Messerschmitts. Over the English Channel the sticky afternoon was as turquoise as Head and Shoulders shampoo.
‘Ah, you’ll have a whale of a time!’ Dad hummed a bendy version of ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’. (The bathroom door’d opened by itself, so I could see Dad’s chest reflected in the mirror as he put on a string vest and the shirt he’d just ironed. Dad’s chest’s as hairy as a cress experiment.) ‘Wish I could be thirteen again.’
Then, I thought, you’ve obviously forgotten what it’s like.

David Mitchell is a writer who has the ability to assume any number of believable and different voices. He proved this in Cloud Atlas, with its array of six seperate narrators that shifts from the 19th Century to a distant and dystopian future. Black Swan Green is far less ambitious with Mitchell adopting one voice for the entire novel, that of a thirteen year old boy.

Jason Taylor lives in Black Swan Green in Worcestershire. It’s 1982. Adolescence and early Eighties Britain is seen through his imaginative eyes; girls, school, friendships and family life. Mitchell scatters references to appropriate television shows and news from the period (the Falklands War casts a large shadow) throughout the novel. Taylor appears a bright lad, he’s recently won a poetry competition. There are, however, things playing on his mind; he suffers from a stammer (referred to throughout the book as Hangman), and he’s constantly conscious of the fragile pecking order that exists in his peer group.

The threat of madness and death looms heavily in Black Swan Green. In one chapter, Jason and his friend stumble across a summer party at a country asylum that is disturbingly cut short, and he has several encounters with other unhinged and potentially dangerous characters. These are usually eccentrics living on the fringes of his comfortable surroundings, such as the larger than life Madame Crommelynck or the band of gypsies he befriends. Jason also constantly refers to children in his school who haven’t quite made the grade when it comes to intelligence, and adulthood is often viewed as a sad, lonely and unfulfilled as personified by parents, neighbours and teachers.

A novel from the point of view of a young male invites comparisons with other recent fiction, particularly The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon and Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre. I’m sure there are countless others that I haven’t read in a trail that goes right back to J.D.Salinger. Black Swan Green also reminded me of Bad Behaviour by William Sutcliffe in how peer pressure means everything to a thirteen year old and how the balance can easily change. Mitchell describes each boy’s status as being similar to army ranks, and Jason slips down to the very bottom as the novel progresses.

My disappointment with Black Swan Green came from my expectations of David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas was such a strange and original novel that I was expecting something similar, and the opening chapter of Black Swan Green is fantastic, describing a lake where many children have died in the past where Jason and his friends play on its frozen surface, the menacing phone calls that his parents are receiving and a very odd encounter at a house in the woods. The novel just doesn’t follow this promise and is more content to settle into more familiar territory with everything interesting, the threats of madness and death, only remaining under the surface. It’s not that I expect every novel I pick up to be dark and disturbing, but I do expect this if the opening chapter suggests so, and where there are many references to accidental deaths haunting the book. Ultimately, Black Swan Green reminded me the most of another book set in 1982 and narrated by a thirteen year old boy, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. This isn’t a criticism, it’s just not what I expected.