Black Swan Green

Book Review

David Mitchell

Jason Taylor is a thirteen-year-old boy who lives in the village of Black Swan Green , in Worcestershire. It's the eighties, and apart from the usual horrors of teenage boyhood, he must also contend with his stuttering, something that continually threatens his precious standing in his class's ranks.

Black Swan Green is David Mitchell's fourth, and perhaps most generally accessible, novel. While the structure is more traditional and is lacking in Mitchell's usual complexities, the linguistic pyrotechnics one has come to expect from him are there in abundance.

The novel covers thirteen months in the thirteen-year-old's life, beginning with a dark January. Jason invades his father's forbidden sanctuary, his home office, when the phone rings over fifty times. Jason answers it, however no one responds. In the background, Jason hears the familiar music of Sesame Street , and knows that someone is listening on the other end. This hints at the background of the novel – the marital problems his parents are undergoing, spurred on by his father's infidelity.

Throughout the novel, Jason undergoes many trials – his stuttering, the usual problematic adolescent relationship with his sister Julia, who disparagingly calls him ‘Thing,' the fickle and ever-shifting loyalties of his friends and classmates, who freeze him out and leave him friendless for much of the book. Watching Jason endure these trials and grow as a young man is somehow familiar.

Mitchell remembers vividly what it is like to be thirteen and have the world (seemingly) against you. His writing is authentic, poignant, and often very funny. This book is a gem, and will hopefully widen David Mitchell's readership! It's a must for Booker 2006!

“On a cane throne sat an old lady.

Old but grand, like she'd stepped out of a portrait, with silver hair and a royal purple shawl. I guessed she was the vicar's mother. Her jewels were as big as Cola Cubes and Sherbet Lemons. Maybe she was sixty, maybe seventy. With old people and little kids you can't be sure. I turned to look at the butler but the butler'd gone.

The old lady's rivery eyeballs chased the words across the pages.

Should I cough? That'd be stupid. She knew I was there.

Smoke streamed upwards from her cigarette.

I sat down on an armless sofa till she was ready to talk. Her book was called Le Grand Meaulnes . I wondered what Meaulnes meant and wished I was as good at French as Avril Bredon.

The clock on the mantelpiece shaved minutes into seconds.

Her knuckles were as ridged as Toblerone. Every now and then her bony fingers swept ash off a page.”

“There's a rule that says you don't gaze too intently at a person's face. Madame Crommelnyck was ordering me to break it.

‘Look closer.'

Those parma violets, I smelt, fabrics, an ambery perfume, and something rotting. Then something weird happened. The old woman turned into an it. Sags ruckussed its eye-bags and eyelids. Its eyelashes'd had been gummed into spikes. Petals of tiny red veins snaked its stained whites. Its irises mistily like long-buried marbles. Make-up dusted its mummified skin. Its gristly nose was subsiding into the skull-hole. ‘You see beauty here?' It spoke in the wrong voice.

Manners told me to say yes.

‘Liar!' It pulled back and became Madame Crommelnyck again. ‘Forty, thirty years ago, yes. My parents created me in the customary fashion. Like your potter making your vase. I grew to a girl. In my lips, my beautiful lips, told my beautiful eyes, ‘you are me.' Men made stratagems and fights, worshipped and deceived, burnt money on extravagances, to ‘win' this beauty. My age of gold.'

Hammering started up in a far-off room.

‘But human beauty falls leaf by leaf. You miss the beginning. One tells one, No, I am tired or The day is bad , that is all. But later, one cannot contradict the mirror. Day by day, it falls, until this vieille sorciere is all who remains, who uses cosmeticians' potions to approximate her birth-gift. Oh, people say, ‘The old are still beautiful! They patronize, they flatter, maybe they wish to comfort themselves. But no. Eating the roots of beauty is a ___' Madame Crommelnyck sank back into her creepy throne, tired out.

‘An, how you say, the snail who has no house?'

‘A slug?'

‘Insatiable, undestructible slug. Where in the hell are my cigarettes?'

The box'd slipped to her feet. I passed them to her.

‘Leave now.' She looked away. ‘Return next Saturday, three o'clock , I tell you more reason why your poems fail. Or do not return. An hundred other works are waiting.' Madame Crommelnyck picked up Le Grand Meaulnes , found her place and started reading. Her breathing'd got whistlier and I wondered if she was ill.

“Thanks, then…'

My legs'd got pins and needles. As far as Madame Crommelnyck was concerned, I'd already left the solarium.”