Black Swan Green

BLACK SWAN GREEN (David Mitchell) - Five Stars

In William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Golding depicts the regression to savagery of a bunch of British school-boys once they are removed from the structured, cultured life of civiled England. In David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, Mitchell astutely points out that the removal from structured, cultured life isn't even a necessary step: teenage boys are often naturally savage, and even naturally monstrous. One of the best parts of Black Swan Green is that, with one notable exception, Mitchell never tries to rationalize or explain the mean actions of the popular kids and the bullies. The bullies torment the Jason and other outcasts because they WANT to, nothing more, nothing less.

This book gets five stars for one simple reason: I have never in my life read a novel where author has so pitch-perfectly conveyed the reality of being an awkward teenage boy. I never identified with Holden Caulfield; I identified almost too much with Jason Taylor. There were parts of this novel that made me ACHE they hit so close to home. I challenge anyone who grew up as a slightly geeky, not-part-of-the-in-crowd teenage boy to not identify at least in some fashion with Jason Taylor. Literally several of the experiences and emotions he had during the course of the novel occurred to me in identical fashion. Very, very little in the book came across as unrealistic hyperbole.

Unlike many novels which try to do too much--and bungle it by focusing just enough attention on an item to make it a major element, but not enough attention to do that item justice--Black Swan Green succeeds by addressing, just briefly, numerous large issues and allowing them to develop in the margins. The slow decay of Jason's parent's marriage, for example, is almost never tackled head-on, but gradually falls apart in between sentences here and there, scattered throughout the chapters. A brilliant section detailing the shittiness of war is all the more effective because it passes briefly: the novel does not dwell on what has been lost.

If there's one speed-bump in the novel for me, it's the chapter where Jason learns the importance of being one's "true self," in the guise of poetry discussions with Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck. While it dutifully propels the story forward, the tone of this chapter feels completely off from the entire rest of the novel. In a novel filled with vibrant, realistic characters, Eva de Crommelynck also seemed completely phony to me, like a writer's construct instead of a real person. I later learned that she was a character in a prior Mitchell novel, and I feel her inclusion in Black Swan Green was an imprudent attempt to shoehorn the novel into the "universe" of his other works. I was also extremely puzzled as to why the same amount of page time (a full chapter) was given to poetry, a relatively minor aspect of Jason's personality (at least for the purposes of the story) that only pops up a half-dozen times during the course of the novel, as was given to his stammering, a major feature that influences almost every scene in the novel.

But that really is nitpicking. The rest of the novel had me enthralled with Jason's fantastical view of what could be, and the adventures that spring forth from happenstance, and had me horrified (but no less enthralled) at the brutal reality of teenage boys' cliques.