MADreads

A world at thirteen

October 22nd, 2007 Jim - South Madison

In Black Swan Green, novelist David Mitchell tries to tell a child’s story using a child’s logic, language and point of view.  The adult novelist David Mitchell  is definitely present in the voice of his thirteen-year-old narrator, Jason Taylor,  as he relates a years worth of events dominated by the disintegration of his parents marriage.  At times, Jason seems a bit too sophisticated for his age.  Yet, to the extent I can remember the way a thirteen-year-old boy sees and talks about things, Mitchell’s done a remarkable act of ventriloquism.

Jason’s story is a universal one: he is trying to find his voice and the courage to use it.  His task is complicated by a stammer which leaves him a bit bullied and an outsider.  However, his stammer delivers a gift.  To hide it, on a daily basis, Jason’s forced to quickly find synonyms and locutions so as to avoid words beginning with certain letters.  This habit gives him a facility with words, a poet’s tongue.

Like many teen outsiders, he’s also blessed with an imagination.  His most prosaic accounts of his daily life will suddenly veer off into beautiful and quite original flights of language.  On the other hand, his poetic description of a woods can be suddenly interrupted by his noting the brand of gum someone is chewing. 

Jason’s story-telling style is what makes this book interesting.  Driven both by a fascination with the world and a contrary wish to escape it, Jason tends toward the spectacular, the unusual and the gross when relating the events of his days.  He very much wants your attention.

This desire of his to engage his listener shapes the novel.  As composed by Mitchell, it is a series of episodic stories, any one of which might almost serve as a stand-alone short story but for Jason’s telling.  Although the central story-thread of any chapter is normally resolved by chapters end, in the process of telling it, Jason will introduce a whole bunch of little, tiny stories along the way.  Many of these go entirely unresolved at a chapters end with Jason only providing closure on them indirectly and in passing, in the course of relating another story much further on.

He has an age-related ability to wander about a story. He is quick to drop a spectacle/adventure if a new one comes to mind.  And, when reality grows unredeemably mundane, his imagination comes to the fore: without notice, commonplace stories will suddenly take sudden and unannounced narrative turns imported from fairy tales and horror movies.  The novel explores the ways people use stories, and how they serve and fail us.

The book is set in England during the year 1983 and is replete with an astonishing amount of detail likely to evoke intense nostalgia for folks who grew up in that time and place as well as for anglophiles who might have done so in a vicarious fashion.  However, this is a universal ‘portrait-of-the artist’ story that is touching and engaging.  And, there are lines and paragraphs you will take away as poems.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction