Sceptre, 2006, 377 p.
It is early 1982. Jason Taylor is about to turn thirteen. His elder sister Julia treats him as an annoyance, his parents are forever arguing and he, like all more or less diffident more or less misfits, is bullied at school. In Jason’s case the fact that he stammers only makes things worse. Thoughts he attributes to figures in his head occasionally intrude. The one he calls Hangman knows he is about to stammer and therefore can allow substitution of a different, less problematic – though delayed – word, while Unborn Twin sometimes offers a commentary on proceedings. Black Swan Green, with its view of the Malvern Hills, is the small town in Worcestershire where Jason lives. It has no swans, black or otherwise. Another burden for Jason is his poetry which he submits to the local church magazine using the pseudonym Eliot Bolivar but he cannot reveal this to the wider world for fear of further ridicule.
As a novel Black Swan Green is peopled by a range of well-drawn characters – distracted parents, various schoolmates (or enemies,) out of touch teachers, supercilious cousins, a frightful uncle, suspicious but not ill-meaning gypsies – and the minutiae that make up a thirteen-year-old’s life. A lot is packed into the year spanning Jason’s thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays in which the book is set. Dad’s forbidden study where strange phone calls are received, an accident on the frozen lake in the woods, interviews with the intimidating Madame Crommelynck who acts as intermediary for transmission of Eliot Bolivar’s poems to the vicar, unfruitful appointments with a speech therapist, a local secret society for young bloods, the Falklands War, an accident at the Goose Fair, his mother’s suspicions and vindication, numerous instances of bullying, plus the ordeal of negotiating school with a stammer, but above all the terrifying unknowableness of girls.
Occasionally Jason’s awareness betrays signs of being assigned to him by an older person, “Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It’s never reasonless and its reason’s not usually nice,” and, “A disco’s a zoo. Some of the animals’re wilder than they are by day, some funnier, some posier, some shyer, some sexier,” but others of his thoughts ring truer to someone on the cusp of adolescence, “But all this excitement’ll never turn dusty and brown in archives and libraries. No way. People’ll remember everything about the Falklands till the end of the world,” though “Neil Young sings like a barn’s collapsing but his music’s brill,” could be said by anyone.
In particular “not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right” is fine for an author to put into the head of a character who’s barely a teenager but even though it’s spot-on would, in print, appear humdrum coming from an older person.
Jason’s thirteen year-old enthusiasm, primed no doubt by his Dad and intolerant right wing uncle, for the outpourings of the Daily Mail and utterances of Margaret Thatcher are counterbalanced by Julia’s Guardian reading perspective. The anti-Romany prejudice of a town-hall meeting to discuss the County Council’s proposal to place a permanent site for gypsies near the town (one contributor says, “Dark as niggers,” about what he calls ‘real’ gypsies) is allowed to speak for itself. When Jason has an accidental encounter with some travellers we learn their take on it; the relevant legislation is all a plot to expunge their way of life. Put like that the incident seems an unnecessary interpolation into the book but it reads much more organically.
Mitchell appears to have successfully got into, or remembered well, the head of an adolescent boy and conjures up 1982 convincingly. His control is such that the reader knows right from the start that Jason’s parents’ marriage has deeper flaws than he thinks and that Julia is not merely an annoying sibling but is on his side against them. This picture of a young teenager struggling to come to terms with the mysteries of the adult world (and the utterly bewildering conundrum of the salience in that world of sexual intercourse) and trying to fit in to that of his peers is beguiling, but Black Swan Green is notable above all for the sympathy with which Mitchell treats all of his characters.
Pedant’s corner:- I noted Scalectrix, (Scalextric,) British Bulldogs (British Bulldog,) Milk of Magnesium (Magnesia,) and Metro Gnome (Metronome) before I recognised that Mitchell was probably trying to represent the spellings of a thirteen year-old. It’s strange though in that case that memsahib is spelled correctly even though Jason tells us he doesn’t know what a memsahib is.
Otherwise; occasionally commas were missing before a piece of direct speech, Margaret Thatcher’s injunction to the nation to ‘Rejoice! Just rejoice!’ is said to come at the end of the Falklands conflict; my memory is that it was on the retaking of South Georgia, before the war proper started, she said that; “put then on the chest of drawers” (put them.) “I wasn’t going to solve this equation and it knew it” (‘and I knew it’ makes more sense,) “black-and-orange Wolverhampton Wanderers tracksuit” (Wolves play in gold and black, not orange,) “Guy Fawkes’ Night” (Guy Fawkes Night,) Socrates’ (Socrates’s,) vacuumed (vacuumed.)
