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! ( )

During his lunch break, a co-worker went into the bookstore by our office. There, in the bargain section, was a stack of Black Swan Green, one of his favorite books. For whatever reason, no book lover likes to see one of their favorites in the bargain section. Sure, it's probably just the product of an overzealous print-run, but if I found something meaningful in that book, then I would tend to think it's being undervalued, and perhaps even tainted by the scarlet sticker emblazoned on its cover. Rather than leave them there to be passed over by those who didn't realize they were walking past a true gem, my co-worker bought them. All. The whole pile of approximately twenty copies. He brought them back to work and started passing them out to anyone who he knew enjoyed reading. His sole caveat was that if you didn't think it would be your cup of tea, pass it along to someone else. The warm and fuzzy feeling elicited by this display of loyalty to a book meant that I simply dove into Black Swan Green, confident that here, I would find an excellent novel.

Black Swan Green is composed of thirteen chapters that chart thirteen months in the life of a thirteen year old boy. Jason Taylor is growing up in the English town of Black Swan Green (located in Worchestershire, which is "somewhere in the middle") in 1982. For England at large, that means Maggie Thatcher, the end of the Cold War, recession, and the Falklands War. For Jason Taylor, it means those things, but they tend to serve as background to his life spent navigating the complicated adolescent world of school, bullies, girls, secret clubs, bickering parents, and speech therapy.

It should come as no surprise that Black Swan Green is semi-autobiographical. Some critics have grumbled about this fact, saying that it restricted Mitchell's movements when he normally plays much more with form in his other work. The novel frames a little over a year in Jason's life, resulting in the fact that there isn't a single narrative arch to the novel. Instead, it could be taken as thirteen short stories, each highlighting an encounter or an experience that the reader can see will help shape his life and his character. Mitchell is then free to linger over details and characters, evoking a sense of what one really remembers about growing up. After reading this, I feel as though I've been given a very intimate glance into Mitchell's life. It went beyond the facts and illuminated the core of what it means to be on the cusp of adulthood, no longer a child but not quite a man. Black Swan Green might not have had a fancy literary format, meant to impress and surprise, but I was certainly dazzled with its quiet beauty and truth. It was quite a bargain indeed. ( )

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell is a beautifully written novel that captures the difficulty of growing up while delivering a unique view of family and society in England circa 1982.

I’d read a number of negative reviews prior to reading Black Swan Green. Many readers seemed unwilling to stray from Mitchell’s multi-narrative structure (as seen in Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten) or couldn’t relate to Jason Taylor, the 13 year old stammering protagonist.

To those naysayers I say this: you are wrong.

Read my full review on the Used Books Blog:
http://usedbooksblog.com/blog/black-s... ( )

This is a wonderful and well written book following the life of a 13 year old boy in 1983 living in a Worcestershire village called Black Swan Green, writing poetry under a pseudonym, fighting a stammer that threatens to make his life a misery, dealing with family tensions and learning a whole lot about himself and others on the way.

I loved the way that the book is written as though the 13 year old boy is writing it. Albeit a talented 13 year old boy, with some very creative use of metaphor - but even here, the writing is deliberately a little overdone to maintain that feeling of youth in the writing.

The author goes to great lengths to fasten the narrative to the year of 1983 - in fact here he does overdo it. Things a 13 year old at the time would take for granted are repeatedly spelled out, so that you feel the author is trying to remind us all the time of the year. But that is a minor criticism for a book that skillfully delves into the life of a 13 year old boy, and makes you remember what it was like - the good an the bad.

This book has hidden depths too. It explores some difficult themes, expertly dancing through them, masterfully pulling the threads together into a whole that is so much more than the sum of its parts.

Highly recommended. ( )

Is it OK to admit that I've not really got David Mitchell before. I plodded through number9dream without enjoying it, and had to miss some of the chapters to get through Cloud Atlas. This, though, I really adored, a wonderfully nostalgic (but not in a bad way) simply told story of childhood, or rather thirteen months of it for a stammering boy in Black Green Swan. You get tales of failure, humiliation, that weirdness that only exists in childhood imagination, but overall, an underlying feel good story, one of triumph (if only in small way) of the underdog. Recommended. ( )

BSG follows the rite of passage of a thirteen year old schoolboy in an English village. It's set in the early 80s and charts the rise and fall of his popularity, his struggle not to reveal a debilitating stammer, and the eventual victory over his bullying schoolmates. It has a wonderful energy and pace and draws you back to your own childhood fears and struggles to find your identity. If you were a teenager in the mid 1980s you will feel right at home. It's like a book version of the film Son of Rambow but with more depth.

A very enjoyable book, only let down in a few places by some slightly jarring and unnecessary internal monologue by the main character. ( )

This novel takes place in a British village in 1983 during the Falklands War. It’s told from the perspective of a 13-year-old boy, and it’s interesting to observe how the fights and relentless power struggles between schoolboys, for whom saving face and maintaining a “tough” reputation is everything, is mirrored by a similar behavior by leaders of nations, with even deadlier consequences. This book presents interesting, multi-faceted portraits of both the place and the individuals. ( )

This is my least favourite of David's books to date, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. Set in 1982, in a small village in middle England. I am about 5 years younger than the main character but I recognised nearly all the references. As I read it, I started getting flashbacks to my childhood, remembering things I had long forgotten. Perhaps the reason I did not like it so much was because it was a little too close to the bone. ( )

I did not love this book as much as I wanted to. David Mitchell, the Booker-shortlisted author of Cloud Atlas and Ghost Written, is known for complex narratives that travel back and forth across space and time. Black Swan Green is his "straight story," 13 months in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor. Like most boys his age, Jason teeters between childhood and adolescence, deeply concerned with catching girls and being cool but also still in love with comics and war games. Life is complicated by a stutter that won't go away and his budding awareness of his parents' frayed marriage.

I began the novel feeling awed by David Mitchell's ability to so perfectly capture the language of a 13-year-old boy enmeshed in the slang and the pop culture of the early 80s. But, as I continued reading, I began to wonder if that was all there was to the book. Each chapter represents one month in Jason's life, which is a realistic way to write, but it often left me wondering where the book was going. Celebrating every day life in writing is great, but this story seemed a little bit too every day. Likewise, Jason's persistent concerns with popularity ring true for a teenage boy, but they grated on my nerves after awhile. Once I accepted that the book wasn't really "going anywhere," at least not in the traditional sense, I settled in for an enjoyably meandering journey. But, although I found the book quite absorbing, I don't feel that I got much out of it. ( )

This is about thirteen year old Jason Taylor between childhood and that awkward time of adolescence. Each chapter reads like a short story as he deals with schoolyard bullies, those strange creatures called girls and his first kiss all the while living with stuttering!
Wonderful with many laugh at loud moments. One of those books that make you realise why it is you love to read. ( )

Very satisfying inside look at the life of a 13 year old boy in suburban Middle Class England. Mitchell constructs the book through a series of chapters that are each like short stories and yet advance the plot and eventually settle open issues. The main character inhabits an alternate universe that is as far removed from the adult world he interacts with as any two cultures one could pick at random. Highly recommend. ( )

I know I should love this novel...but I didn't. Mitchell's style of writing took me a while to get into, and even after I didn't feel fully vested in the plot. There were characters and situations that were included that never really added to the plot. It was worth the read, but not great. ( )

How different from "Cloud Atlas"! But how delightful nonetheless.

Here Mitchell tells the story of the triumphs and tragedies of growing up in the U.K. of the recent past. Once I felt I could slog through the British slang, this story proves to be bright and alive, touching and true, funny and triumphant. Proof, if any more was needed, of Mitchell's range. ( )

Damn, Mitchell really is a genius. This book is a bittersweet mix of cruelty and kindness, of idiocy and maturity, and of the pain and delight of growing up, from the point of view of a perceptive and complex teenager -- a genuine masterpiece version of Adrian Mole. ( )

http://bookcrossing.com/journal/51810... ( )

I have a hard time saying why this book is so charming. Perhaps it's Jason's naked honesty as a narrator, the way he lays bare his own insecurity. Perhaps it's the way he anthropomorphizes his own impulses and problems, or how the initially de rigeur contempt/resentment relationship with his older sister rapidly becomes something more respectful and interesting. Perhaps it's that he writes poetry under the name of Eliot Bolivar.

At any rate, Black Swan Green manages to make a memorable voice and an individual story out of what seems like very ordinary material: young boy struggles with identity and social acceptance in small English town in the 80s. The plot does have its predictable moments, but also its surprises. I enjoyed the book, read it quickly, and liked Jason much more than the average teen protagonist. ( )

http://nomiddlename.blogspot.com/2008... ( )

A cultural-reference-soaked journey back to the 1980s, perfectly aimed at the 35+ generation, who came of age during this decade just as Mitchell's protagonist is doing.

On one level, this book was extremely well-crafted and catapulted me backwards to a time I remembered oh so well. It made it very easy to identify with the main character from the outset - a boy on the cusp of teenage awakening, dealing with bullying, stuttering, divorce and the change in family dynamics caused by an older sister moving away. The reader follows him through first crushes and kisses in a way that is almost painful for those of us who were in his position at the same moment in time. The fact that I remained caught up in his really mundane life is a testament to Mitchell's easy writing style and the reality of his characters.

On another level, the book isn't subtle. The cultural references fall thick and fast in every paragraph and I would be interested to know how it reads for someone of a different age or cultural background for whom the social and commercial references have a less immediate meaning.

I thoroughly enjoyed this nostalgia ride and find Mitchell's prose style, while not deep, extremely accessible and easy on the reading ear. I would certainly recommend it: for those of us that lived that time, it will take you right back and for those that didn't, it will show you clearly what it was like for the rest of us! ( )

A colleague came to school this fall raving about this book - I tried to pick it up, just couldn't get into it. I came across it on CD and decided to try it that way. Even in my car I couldn't stay interested. Although I thought the writing style was good, I just found my mind wandering. I'm giving up! ( )

There’s a lot to like about this book – from the mainly authentic sounding voice of the thirteen year old Jason to the humorous or vivid way of phrasing feelings or situations such talking about 'my jeans pockets corked with a crusty hanky to foil pickpockets' when he’s off on his own in Lyme Regis. The lightness of style which is more predominant in the first half of the book disguises some of the difficulties Mitchell shows about growing up and how cruel children can be to each other and how difficult home situations can be when your parents are splitting up.

There are a lot of observations about how to live life offered along the way as Jason comes to terms with his stammer and social position – most these being more or less natural thoughts emerging from the situations Jason found himself in. Towards the end, though, I found them a bit too dominant. Still, I liked the way Mitchell had Jason thinking in terms of multiple personalities such as Hangman, Unborn Twin and Maggot.

Mitchell uses this quasi autobiography to make a lot of criticisms of people and contemporary events in 1982. He shows how bad the Falklands War was and shows what he thinks about people prejudiced against gypsies, for example, even if the latter is a bit manufactured.

It's obviously a really carefully written novel, though, not just with the thirteen chapters for thirteen months while Jason is thirteen but in the way Mitchell conveys his ideas. At the end bringing the swan to Black Swan Green when there had never been one there perhaps suggests some optimism as Jason is leaving. I also like the parallels between Jason's fighting parents and the Falklands War. These subtler parts work well, I think. Having Jason initially supporting the war is more effective than his overt moral conclusions. Similarly I liked the way he went back to help Dean Moran at Mr Drake's but we don't see what happens and only get the consequences of this in later brief references to what happened.

It perhaps becomes a little sentimental towards the end to when he sees his sister as a sensitive, supportive young woman after he'd felt how sharp and critical she was while his father, almost a caricature of a supermarket manager at first, becomes a much more human and sensitive man.

Still, it held my attention very well, Mitchell's writing seeming so apt and effortless. As he has Jason say, 'authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job.' ( )