Very interesting coming-of-age story set in a small English town in the 1980s. A year of Jason's life is told in chapters that have a few overarching threads and themes, but stand equally well alone (particularly the first two chapters, which are worth rereading). Particular problems for him are his rise and fall in popularity at the hands of his ruthless classmates; controlling his stammer; his parents' curious relationship; the war in the Balkans; his secret poetry writing and mentorship; and how he is ever going to replace his grandfather's antique watch that his father gave him and that he breaks ice skating in the first chapter. Really well-done. ( )

The town of Black Swan Green in 1982 provides the setting for David Mitchell’s adolescent coming of age story that might just be autobiographical. Jason Taylor is thirteen years old and serves as narrator of the story that describes one year in his life, a year full of possibilities and loaded with teenage angst as well.

Jason is an aspiring poet who uses the pen name Eliot Bolivar to conceal his identity as his poetry is published in the local parish magazine. He becomes a regular contributor. This is something that no one at school can discover or his life would be even more hellish than it already is. He is a boy trying desperately to fit in and making a miserable job of it. He longs to be a boy called by his first name, like the other “cool” kids. In actuality, he’s called by his last name and lumped in with other boys also determined to be unworthy. Below him are those boys called by made up names, like Squelch. This three tier system exists solely for the amusement of those in the top tier, who regularly bully those below them. Jason’s position within the system deteriorates in time until he’s called Maggot and pushed to the breaking point.

Contributing to Jason’s despair and making him a prime target of the others is the fact that he stutters. He has named the thing that won’t allow the words to come out properly “Hangman.” Even his teachers contribute to this by forcing him to recite long passages aloud. His sessions with his speech therapist provide relief for him, a place where he can relax so much that his stuttering disappears, making it that much harder to treat.
As if all this isn’t enough for one teenager to endure, Jason’s parents fight continually and are heading towards a divorce and Jason has a crush on one of the cool girls, who is completely unaware of him.

The climax of the story occurs when Jason determines that he has to show these bullies that he’s not afraid of them. Stick it out for a little while and they’ll back off. There’s no fun in bullying someone and getting no response.

Throughout the book, Mitchell’s prose shines. He throws out one zinger after another, page after page:

“A cow of an awkward pause mooed.” (Page 52)
“A brick of loneliness is reaching terminal velocity inside me.” (Page 166)
“Sunlight on waves is drowsy tinsel.” (Page 173)
“Questions aren’t questions. Questions are bullets” and “Their arguments are speed chess these days.” (Page 223 and 224 referring to his parents’ fights)
“Poems are lenses, mirrors and x-ray machines.” (Page 224)

The writing is divine, the story is top notch, the young narrator is so vulnerable and likable that you want to take him home and protect him from all the nastiness in the world. Mitchell is a marvelous storyteller and I look forward to reading more of his books. Highly recommended. ( )

A truly incredible book - the kind where as soon as I close it I itch to write to the author to tell him how impressed I am. A coming-of-age novel set in a small English town/village during the era of the Faulklands War. So many coming-of-age novels are saccharine, cliched or depressing - this is none of those. It's incredibly real, with emotions, dialogue, events, and a whole atmosphere of how awful and amazing it is to be 13 years old.

It's not a YA book, not to my mind anyway. It's written for adults, insightful and intelligent (not that YA isn't that! It is!), aimed at an audience that has been there, rather than one that is there now. The main character is delightful, and his voice rings with truth.

What made this book for me above all else was a certain character who appears for just one chapter in the middle of the book, the Belgian old lady with her music, her truth and her 'butler'. I haven't met a character as captivating as her for years.

"Black Swan Green" is a break from Mitchell's usual style. Previously, he rivalled Michael Chabon as an author commendably unafraid to plunge into the waters of speculative fiction, despite what the long-beards on the Pulitzer and Booker boards might have to say about it. His previous novel, "Cloud Atlas," was a dazzling trip through space and time, from the South Pacific in the 19th century to the dystopic, Gibsonesque streets of a 22nd century Korea, to the savage and brutal islands of Hawaii long after life has been snuffed out in the rest of the world. It's partly because of this that "Cloud Atlas" is my favourite book. There are very few writers in the world who are able (and willing) to approach genre fiction with genuine literary skill, and I love them all.

Yet "Black Swan Green" is what some might call a "maturation." Split into thirteen chapters and set from January 1982 to 1983, it chronicles a year in the life of Jason Taylor, growing up in the titular village in Worcestershire. It is clearly, to some extent, a fictionalised autobiography. Jason is a shy and quiet boy, intelligent but not a genius, an aspiring poet. The novel follows his typical teenage trials - popularity at school, his parents' rocky marriage, the inevitable encounters with girls - with barely a whisper of the more exotic and imaginative flair that rapidly made David Mitchell my favourite author. "Black Swan Green" holds no fabricants, no non-corpus, no nuclear wars, no expeditions to the ruined observatories atop Mauna Kea. Instead we have Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands War, Woodbines, Beta and the jingoism of the Daily Mail.

This is not entirely a bad thing; "Black Swan Green" is still an excellent novel. David Mitchell is endlessly readable; he could write a novel about bricklaying and I'd buy it. His effortless use of prose to create beautiful, elegant sentences is something I've mentioned before, and of equal merit is the wide range of themes he weaves into his stories.

Not since "Ender's Game" have I read something that so hideously reminded me of what those early years of high school are like: the savagery and the cruelty, the constant fear and anxiety, a few asshole kids capable of making me miserable on a whim ("Picked on kids act invisible to reduce the chances of being noticed and picked on," Jason notes). Once you become an adult, when people automatically treat each other with civility and respect, it's easy to forget what wretched pieces of shit most young teenagers are. "It's all ranks, being a boy, like the army," Jason says, and while his own popularity rises considerably over the course of the year, it all comes crashing down with a single act - one which any adult would characterise as selfless and brave.

Jason eventually learns to fight back, and stand up for himself, and repels his tormentors in a story arc I found to be entirely too convenient. You change fast when you're thirteen - but not quite that fast.

Jason's thoughts and feelings are livened up somewhat by the presence of three voices in his head, facets of his personality. Hangman is the personification of his stutter, a cruel monster that strangles his words, forcing him to live in constant fear that his secret will be discovered and he will be forever pegged "Stutterboy" by the other kids. Maggot represents everything he hates about himself, all his worst desires, particularly his desperate need to be accepted by his peers, no matter what the cost to his personal values and integrity. Unborn Twin is the most mysterious, sometimes a guiding angel and sometimes a luring demon, never fully explained.

There are a few shout-outs to Mitchell's other novels - Neal Brose, one of Jason's bullies, is the narrator of the Hong Kong segment in "Ghostwritten," a shady financial lawyer who will one day experience his own epiphany and drop dead of a heart attack. The Neal Brose of "Ghostwritten" is not a good person, but not a bad one either - he is a human being, flawed and complex, containing multitudes. Mitchell's choice of this character is not an accident; he is reminding us that everybody grows, that while Jason's peers may be dickheads, they won't always be. As Jason points out, though, "How does that help me?"

The more interesting second encounter is with Eva van Crommelynck, who was a teenager in "Cloud Atlas," and the object of Robert Frobisher's desire. She is an old woman now, tutoring Jason in poetry, and at one point they leaf through her old photo album together. Robert Frobisher, "Cloud Atlas"' greatest character, is enshrined in black and white, and Eva spends a page or two recounting his fate and revealing the terrible guilt she felt over his suicide. Zedelghem, we learn, was destroyed during World War II. Now it's just "little boxes for houses, a gasoline station, a supermarket."

And, of course, we revisit Mitchell's favourite themes. Aside from the obvious presence of predation in schoolyard bullying, we see bigotry and hatred and ignorance cropping up everywhere. Walking down a country lane, Jason is told to clear off by a farmer who then sets his dogs loose. Jason escapes, and is "Okay, but poisoned. The dog man despised me for not being born here. He despised me for living down Kingfisher Meadows. That's a hate you can't argue with. No more than you can argue with mad Dobermanns." The casual racism flung about by Jason's older relatives, pompously waffling on in the assumption that their younger audience agrees with them, felt very familiar: "The fact of the matter is" (Uncle Brian doesn't hear what he doesn't want to) "the Japs are still fighting the war. They own Wall Street. London's next. Walking from the Barbican to my office, you'd need... twenty pairs of hands to count all the Fu Manchu look-alikes you pass by." And when the council proposes a permanent gypsy settlement next to Black Swan Green, the villagers assemble an "emergency" meeting to protest it. Jason is repulsed by their violent prejudice, but when he encounters some gypsies himself, he finds that they too hold similar prejudices against the townfolk, and uses the same metaphor twice to describe their narrow minds and blinkered eyes.

It is a cruel world we live in. And there's nothing we can do about that. For the October edition of The Atlantic magazine, Andrew Sullivan wrote an open letter to George Bush, urging him to personally take responsibility for the countless acts of torture that occurred during his administration. Sullivan was formerly an advocate of prosecution, arguing that Cheney and Bush and their ilk needed to be held fully accountable for their actions if the United States was to truly live up to its ideals. Now he argues that this would "tear the country apart" (a cop-out excuse used during every season finale of 24). Instead he urges Bush to take personal responsibility, to apologise, to demand an independent inquiry and to admit that he was wrong.

We all know that Bush will never do this - even this, this small and tiny thing, far easier than what he truly deserves, which is to be tried in the Hague as a war criminal. He will remain encapsulated in Texas, living amongst the 20% of the American population who still think he was a great President. He will deny even to himself that he ever did the wrong thing.

A reader wrote in to the Sullivan shortly afterwards: "What I saw was the final summation of a very fine attorney - an attorney for the defence of this nation and our deepest values. It was a summation made not to a jury and a courtroom, but to everyone in the nation, and to history; a summation made in the clear knowledge that no actual indictments will ever be brought against these men in the real world, no verdicts entered, no sentences handed down. It was left to the power of the pen and the pixel to render judgement - which you did, brilliantly... You indicted, tried, convicted and sentenced them all in one grand piece."

This is how I feel about David Mitchell, not as an author or an entertainer, but as an observer of the world around us. It is a world of unspeakable cruelty, of barbarity and violence, from the sickening taunts of bullies in "Black Swan Green" to the savage rape and murder perpetrated by Kona tribesman in "Cloud Atlas," to the very real torture inflicted on detainees of questionable guilt in CIA black sites all over the world. It is a world full of hatred and prejudice, which Jason aptly describes as "poison." As infuriating as the poison itself is, the most frustrating and heartbreaking part is its inexplicable nature - the lack of a why. This will never change. But as long as we have writers like David Mitchell (and Andrew Sullivan), gifted wordsmiths and good people, to at least acknowledge and decry the poison, we'll be okay.

I just hope that in the future, Mitchell will return to combining this with the imaginative, exotic adventures I came to love in his previous novels. ( )

I loved this book! While I was never a teenage boy and my life never had nearly this much drama when I was a kid, I could still definitely relate to a lot of it. I'm amazed by how well the author remembers what it was like to be 13. His narrator was totally believable. And a lot of the writing was absolutely beautiful. "If swans weren't real, myths'd make them up." Plus, reading all that British 80's slang makes me want to talk nonsense words and pretend they mean something! ( )