The golden rule of show business is to always leave your audience wanting more. David Mitchell is a bad boy who continually breaks this rule. I’ve read two other of David Mitchell’s novels, Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, after which I had written off its author as a meandering hack. At the behest of a colleague whose taste I trust, I decided to give Mitchell another chance by reading Black Swan Green. Now, having finished it, I think it is largely like his other novels: it has some merits, it’s too long by half, it succumbs to bloat, and feels adrift. Mitchell seems to have some great ideas but just can’t bring them all together into a cohesive story.
Black Swan Green is probably the most focused of Mitchell’s novels that I’ve read. It’s a Bildungsroman about Jason Taylor, a young British boy with a speech impediment that dabbles in poetry. Each chapter deals with a kind of formative moment in his life, ranging from being bullied by his classmates to having his poetry edited by an elderly woman to being supervised by his dad’s subordinate to his first kiss to his parents’ failing marriage. The novel reads as, mostly, episodic. There are through-lines and characters that pop-up repeatedly, but a lot of the chapters could be read in isolation.
To be clear, I have no issue with “slice of life” fiction. It gives Mitchell the freedom to deal with a range of experiences and offer insights into the psychology of youth and beyond. A number of the lessons that Jason learns are poignant, especially when viewed through the lens of a child. However, I kept expecting there to be a conflict that developed in a cohesive way. There’s some hint of that with Jason’s speech impediment and how he deals with bullies, but some chapters felt superfluous to the grander vision of the book. The last few chapters seem to tie details together and bring threads to a close, but it didn’t feel earned in the same way that a continuous story does. It shoehorns in lessons about secrecy and guilt, which, on their own, are great, but feel underdeveloped in Jason’s inner conflict and quickly resolved with the aim to give the book a ‘point.’
That’s not to say I didn’t like the concept. There’s a great chapter where Jason finds a bully’s wallet, replete with six hundred pounds, and debates with himself what to do with it. That’s the most finely wrought guilt sub-plot in the book, in my opinion, because it also leads to other layers of guilt: the boy whose wallet was lost fights his girlfriend; Jason finds out that the bully’s dad will likely beat him and decides to give the wallet back; the bully finds his girlfriend to make up and finds her hooking up with someone else; he gets angry and steals a motorbike, gets in an accident, and loses his leg. All this for a lost wallet. It’s the kind of turn-of-the-screw that captures the absurdity of how life actually is.
Mitchell sometimes gets things so right that it’s hard to resist the book’s charm. In one chapter, Jason’s aunt, uncle, and cousins come to visit. The tension and one-upmanship of his family is uncomfortable. In particular, Jason’s mom tries to leverage his poetry to gain points with the extended family, not realizing how negatively this would be received. Of course, it goes over like a lead balloon—until his older cousin Hugo comes to his defence. The chapter is beautifully done: Hugo is a charmer who wins Jason’s confidence before they retreat to play some darts, during which Hugo tears into his younger brother and then denies that he made him cry. He later shoplifts and forces Jason into being an accomplice. The journey of the chapter is excellent, since Hugo is presented in such a positive light before the curtain gets pulled back—we’re right alongside Jason’s experience of learning about Hugo. I love that tension and nuance of Hugo’s character development.
Later, there’s a scene that reads as both true to life and pleasantly mischievous. Jason is searching for a secret tunnel alongside his friend, though the two get separated. Jason then comes across Dawn Madden, a girl with dark honey eyes. There’s a kind of ambiguous flirtation where she makes him act like a dog and offers him a snack. The scene perfectly captures that awkward but exciting temptation of youth. The girl’s flirtations are cruel but hard to resist—except, of course, at that age, boys often don’t pick up on what these interactions mean. Jason botches the flirtation and is sent away with threats of Dawn’s dad’s shotgun. I loved that scene.
Other areas of the book are relatable, too, sure. When Jason is becoming a budding poet and trying to get a grasp on the craft, I can see some of the pitfalls I’ve experienced reflected in Jason’s early works, too. That said, there are some surprisingly poetic descriptions in the book: “Run across a field of daisies at warp speed but keep your eyes on the ground. It’s ace. Petaled stars and dandelion comets streak the green universe. Moran and I got to the barn at the far side, dizzy with intergalactic travel. I was laughing more than Moran ‘cause Moran’s dry trainer wasn’t dry anymore, it was glistening in cow shit” (80).
In fact, there are a number of lines in the book about the writing process and love of the written word that I quite enjoyed. For instance, Jason describes how arranging words together speeds up time. In a different section, Jason is referring to metronomes, and notes that “Metro Gnomes’re in rain and poems too, and breathing, not just tocks of clocks” (34). The significance of writing to the main character shines through.
In fact, what Mitchell does well is ‘voice.’ He’s great at taking on a particular voice in his writing and sustaining a commitment to that style. This is true in the diverse time periods and styles in Cloud Atlas, and is thoroughly developed in Jason’s internal monologue. In many cases, Jason sounds like the youth he is, and the narrational style perpetually keeps in mind the fact that the narrator has a speech impediment. He interrupts ideas because “Hangman” (the metaphor for his speech impediment) stands in the way. Intrusive thoughts are attributed to Jason’s Unborn Twin. The kinds of logic and calculations that Jason engages in feel authentic for a young man trying to find his place in the world. Even the rumination of who is called what is compelling: you can sort the popularity of the children based on who calls each other by last names, first names, or nicknames. It feels accurate, even if I can’t recall an example from my own experience at this exact moment.
The more I write about Black Swan Green, the more I think of moments in the text I found touching. Even the understated moment of Jason’s older sister Julia moving away is handled with beautiful tact. If you think of the book as a collection of moments, it’s pretty good. If you go in expecting an actual novel, I think the continuousness of the story is lacking. It’s actually a little like To Kill a Mockingbird—lots of moments that are loosely tied together. In particular, there’s a town hall meeting where the villagers are up in arms about a group of nomadic people in the area (they use the G word, if that helps contextualize what I’m referring to). Jason Taylor is essentially Scout Finch in this scene, witnessing first hand the racism in his community. Then, he ends up falling into a pit where they are staying and is forced to see first hand that they are not so bad and, in fact, the prejudice against them is actually more relatable than he had thought. Again, the scene works reasonably well on its own as a lesson in not judging others. The conflict is then essentially dropped, with the only callback being that the nomadic people run the county fair and one of the boys from the encampment comes to Jason’s aid.
All things considered, it’s a reasonably good book. Shave off a hundred pages and it might even be great. Prior to Black Swan Green, I was almost certain I would never read another David Mitchell book. After reading Black Swan Green, I still don’t feel inclined to read David Mitchell, but I’ll bump him up from “never again” to “maybe in a decade if I run out of other books.”
Happy reading!
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