Review: Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell
by Rich Horton
Most of Mitchell's books are to some extent genre-adjacent -- Cloud Atlas, for example, incorporates historical sections, a thriller, and sections set far in the future (all intriguingly and metafictionally entwined.) The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is an historical novel set in Nagasaki at the turn of the 19th Century, and including an extended episode that reads like a pure pulp story in some ways. Slade House is straight horror, and The Bone Clocks extends from the present day into a climate-change-wracked future. Black Swan Green, however, seems quite straightforward: the first person narrative of a boy growing up in Worcestershire in 1982, with noticeable semi-autobiographical elements. Having said that, the novel does, as with all of Mitchell's novels, feature characters from other Mitchell novels, most obviously the main character's cousin Hugh Lamb, who is one of the central characters in The Bone Clocks.
There are 13 chapters, each covering a month, from January 1982 through January 1983. Jason Taylor turns 13 at the start of the novel. He lives in the village of Black Swan Green in Worcestershire, in the west of England near the Malvern Hills. His father is an executive at the Greenlands grocery story concern, and his mother is (for now) a housewife. Jason attends the local comprehensive school. He is -- like most 13 year olds -- intensely concerned with social status at school, himself maintaining a precarious position somewhere in the middle, complicated by him being a pretty good student and an aspiring poet (who has published poems in the parish newsletter, naturally under a (pretentious) pseudonym, Eliot Bolivar; and furthered by the fact that his family are outsiders, living in a nice suburban sort of house in a new development outside the village.
The chapters organize themselves around central episodes during that year -- Jason breaking his treasured watch; the Falklands War and its effect on the locals, particularly the elder brother of a classmate; a fight between two of the school bullies; Jason's crush on a girl who ends up with one of the bullies; Jason's getting a chance to join a gang; a dinner party in which Jason's parents host his mother's sister and her husband and their children (including Hugh Lamb, who is a bit older and a lot bolder than Jason); an encounter with some nearby gypsies (following a city meeting about the proposed establishment of a compound for the gypsies); Jason finding a lost wallet at a carnival/fair, with tragic consequences; a school dance with much happier results for Jason, etc.
Those are episodes, but the linking themes follow primarily the fundamental changes in Jason's life, and his family's fortunes. It's clear from the start that Jason's parents' marriage is in trouble. Jason himself is pretty normal -- liking the sort of music I remember from 1982 (though I'm a decade older than he and Mitchell), having crushes on a couple of girls, dealing with bullies and finally holding his own (I do have to say I found his school much fuller of sadists (including some teachers) than I remember from any of my schools.) Jason's sister Julia is presented as fairly idealized -- a good student and future lawyer, much desired by boys her age and pretty sensible about dealing with them, and clearly adored by her brother who would never admit that. And in the end Jason's life will undergo a significant -- though not exactly earth-shattering -- change.
It's a very enjoyable and moving novel. Parts of it are very funny -- the early dinner party is a highlight in that sense. Parts are quite dark. Parts are sweet, others are exciting. I really loved the chapter in which Jason gets advice about poetry, about reading, and about music, from an old, eccentric, and fascinating Belgian woman. The depictions of life in the village, of the local geography, of the main characters all truly land. The portrayal of a disintegrating marriage is convincing and affecting. Perhaps a couple of the episodes seem to work about a bit conveniently, though. Still a really nice book. I can't rank it at the top of Mitchell's output, but it's very much worth reading.
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