Black Swan Green

There are books that make you squirm. That bring an old, sick feeling back to your stomach. That make you want to climb back under the covers and and not come out until the book has gone away. Pretty much anything that covers going to school in the eighties and bullying and awkwardness and general cluelesness will do it for me.

Back Swan Green covers a year in the life of a boy in 1982. There is family discord. There's a big sister. There's bullies and mad mates and music and books and holidays and fairs and burgeoning literary ambition. It's a year of terror and transformation. magic and disillusionment, loss and enrichment, growth and change, loneliness and embarrassment, poetry and first kisses. It's brilliant, and if it had bee an show more iota less brilliant I wouldn't have been able to read it. Thanks for all the trauma, David Mitchell. It was epic. show less

Black Swan Green follows a thirteen year old boy around. He is a likeable young chap who is mega shy, has problems speaking and wants to write things down. There are other kids who are bothersome to him/make his soul hurt. His parents are trying hard to not let on that their marriage is in trouble. So far, so you or I or anyone and everyone.

Mitchell takes nostalgia and gleefully messes with the presumptions of this the reader may have. Each chapter is its own separate snapshot of Jason's existence at age thirteen in the early eighties. Being an eighties kid this is nothing but pure joy for me, though I usually recoil from nostalgia as too much of a refuge. Here Mitchell uses as much period detail as is possible; every chapter is rammed show more with it, and very pointedly so. To me this was about memory and the way we recall our lives, especially as crucial times slip further from us into a mist that turns into a fog. These trigger points of common reference whilst setting a very clear sense of time and place also highlight through their commonality the alienating nature of things familiar to everyone. After all, there is no better measure of a failing friendship than if all you talk about are things you once did together or tv shows you saw as a kid ("Do you remember 'Mysterious Cities of Gold', or 'Ulysses' or Mr Noseybonk" etc).

As a child from a broken home I have had some of the conversations Jason has in this book. They are understated and awful and full of people trying to do their best and failing but absolutely full of the painful shifting truths that seem catastrophic at the time but ultimately embolden us as we reach over and around our fears and challenges. Mitchell shows this so simply and skilfully I almost want to hug him. It is also a brave book in that the central crux is Jason and his struggle to find a way to deal with life, not what actually happens to him. Life will always have its way of sideswiping you, and Mitchell demonstrates this by phasing into and out of the different incidences in Jason's life, all the while maintaining a focus on the arc of Jason's inner world.

I have to say this did remind me of one excruciating school disco trying to do a dance routine to Taylor Dayne's Tell It to My Heart with badly crimped hair and being pointed at constantly by Laura Wooldridge. Still brings me out in a cold sweat.

Pretty wonderful. show less

Jason, the narrator and protagonist of Black Swan Green, is thirteen years old. Perhaps that’s why this is marketed as a YA title. But older readers will enjoy it, too, no matter how long it has been since they were thirteen.

It doesn’t merit a spoiler alert to say the book is about growing pains. Added to the normal burden of being a young teen, Jason stammers (I was glad to learn the distinction between stuttering and stammering). This singles him out for bullying.

Worse, Jason writes poetry, but he hides that. “If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, ‘When you’re ready.’” I liked how Mitchell has Jason mix the acute observation of a budding poet show more with inarticulate slang (now dated — the book is set in 1982).

Aficionados of David Mitchell’s books know that a central theme is recurrence. In Black Swan Green, he expresses this by bringing in Eva de Crommelynck, who readers first encountered as a headstrong eighteen-year-old in Mitchell’s previous book, Cloud Atlas. I enjoyed her appearance here as an imperious old lady.

My enjoyment grew from then on. The climax is perfectly placed, the denouement poignant, and the last line the best I’ve read in a long time. Docked one star for too many names of movies, television shows, and pop songs show less

Filled with 1980’s nostalgia, Black Swan Green transports the reader to a small town in Worcestershire, England, where thirteen-year-old narrator and protagonist Jason Taylor is dealing with the familiar challenges of adolescence. We follow his life in this small town as he seeks acceptance, observes the growing disharmony in his parents’ marriage, clashes with schoolyard bullies, battles a stammer that makes him agonizingly self-conscious, secretly writes poetry, and begins to mature into a more self-aware individual.

This book paints a portrait of an innocent youth starting to deal with the often-painful realities of life and learning that appearances can be deceptive. It is a character-driven story told linearly in thirteen show more chapters. I thought Mitchell did an excellent job of capturing the voice of a teenage boy, and the writing is reflective of how an adolescent would talk. A large portion of the book is spent inside Jason’s head listening to his inner dialogue around such topics as his discomfort around his parents’ marital troubles, dealing with the ridicule of his schoolmates, his push/pull relationship with his sister, his attempts to overcome speech difficulties, reactions to the Falklands War, and guilt over specific actions. I felt his pain and became invested finding out what was going to happen with him.

It takes a while to ramp up and builds momentum towards the end. I thought certain chapters were brilliant. I especially enjoyed the chapter entitled “Solarium” that features a flamboyantly eccentric character, Madame Crommelynck, an elderly Belgian woman who engages him in conversations about art, music, poetry, literature, and language. It contains elegant observations about youth and age, life and death, beauty and truth.

This book is filled with meaningful examinations on the vulnerabilities in human relationships and the difficulties in being true to oneself while feeling pressured to fit in. Although the story is narrated by a teen, I felt I got more out of it reading it as an adult than I would have when I was much younger. Recommended to those that enjoy subtle, contemplative, character-driven stories, especially those related to coming-of-age. show less

Jace’s ace!

Jason Taylor is Will McKenzie, Adrian Mole and Benjamin Trotter with spokey dokeys on. I just loved everything about Black Swan Green – the characters, the content, the style, the setting, the local dialect, the humour and the nostalgia.

The characters spring to life in a single sentence.
“Alex is seventeen but he’s got bubonic zits and his body’s three sizes too large for him”.
“The man’s lips were gnarled and his sooty hair had a streak of white like combed-in bird crap”.

The cultural references to the early Eighties are spot on and I was instantly transported back to 1982 relishing Findus Crispy Pancakes and Butterscotch Angel Delight for tea and finding a furry stick of Wrigley’s juicy fruit chewing gum show more in my duffle coat pocket.

Adolescent angst - the horrors of school discos, wanting to be one of cool kids but knowing you’ll always be middle-ranking at best, trying to stay well below the radar and finding your parents cringingly embarrassing - was made all too real.

The reported speech had the local Worcestershire accent down to a T and the lyrical language reflecting Jason’s poetic bent was simply heavenly.
“The big field was full of wary ewes and spanking-new lambs. The lambs tiggered up close, bleeping like those crap Fiat Noddy cars, idiotically pleased to see me.”

I read most of this book with a smile on my face and laughed out loud in places.
But it’s not all ha-ha-ha. There’s serious stuff in here too. Coping with and trying to overcome a speech defect, being bullied, marriage break-ups, dementia, dysfunctional families, the personal consequences of the Falklands War and life-changing motorbike accidents. A little bit of everything.

This was my first David Mitchell novel and I hit pay dirt.
I can’t recommend Black Swan Green highly enough. show less

It's been 30 years since I hit my teens, but reading this bought it all back in all its glorious, hideous detail. I wasn't 13 in 1982 (I was 10), I wasn't a boy and I didn't stutter, but David Mitchell has managed to capture the experience so completely and in such detail that this feels almost real. The sensations that Jason experiences are so well formed that you can feel yourself riding the self same rollercoaster of teenage emotions. The detail is part of what makes this. The music references (especially the mishearing of Oliver's Army struck a chord), the food (no, I'd never eat a Findus crispy pancake now, but even I remember them being the bees knees), the falkland's war, all of it vivid and evocative of a decade that it's show more probably best to bury in the past where it belongs. The reference to Ra-ra skirts at the end made my blood run cold.
Jason is entirely convincing as a teenager, his trial and tribulations and what he sees of the world around him is plausible. No way would I want to be a teenager again, this fleeting visit back in time reminds you just how difficult an age it is. show less

Filled with 1980’s nostalgia, Black Swan Green transports the reader to a small town in Worcestershire, England, where thirteen-year-old narrator and protagonist Jason Taylor is dealing with the familiar challenges of adolescence. We follow his life in this small town as he seeks acceptance, observes the growing disharmony in his parents’ marriage, clashes with schoolyard bullies, battles a stammer that makes him agonizingly self-conscious, secretly writes poetry, and begins to mature into a more self-aware individual.

This book paints a portrait of an innocent youth starting to deal with the often-painful realities of life and learning that appearances can be deceptive. It is a character-driven story told linearly in thirteen show more chapters. I thought Mitchell did an excellent job of capturing the voice of a teenage boy, and the writing is reflective of how an adolescent would talk. A large portion of the book is spent inside Jason’s head listening to his inner dialogue around such topics as his discomfort around his parents’ marital troubles, dealing with the ridicule of his schoolmates, his push/pull relationship with his sister, his attempts to overcome speech difficulties, reactions to the Falklands War, and guilt over specific actions. I felt his pain and became invested finding out what was going to happen with him.

It takes a while to ramp up and builds momentum towards the end. I thought certain chapters were brilliant. I especially enjoyed the chapter entitled “Solarium” that features a flamboyantly eccentric character, Madame Crommelynck, an elderly Belgian woman who engages him in conversations about art, music, poetry, literature, and language. It contains elegant observations about youth and age, life and death, beauty and truth.

This book is filled with meaningful examinations on the vulnerabilities in human relationships and the difficulties in being true to oneself while feeling pressured to fit in. Although the story is narrated by a teen, I felt I got more out of it reading it as an adult than I would have when I was much younger. Recommended to those that enjoy subtle, contemplative, character-driven stories, especially those related to coming-of-age. show less