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Charmaine Chan

Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

Sceptre, $246

If  David Mitchell's  first three books performed back flips, somersaults  and other eye-popping acrobatic feats of plotting, Black Swan Green - about the trials of being a 13-year-old  English boy - is a relatively simple forward roll.

Written in a linear format, the novel is told through the voice  of Jason Taylor, aka poet Eliot Bolivar. He may not be really popular at school (those boys

'get called by their first names'), but he's also not among the most picked on (those boys are given 'piss-take nicknames like moron Moran'). Which makes him pretty average, except that he has a fondness for verse and a stammer - a speech impediment that people continue knocking, he  says, long after they've grown  out of ridiculing 'spazzos'.

These two traits, plus the  fact that Jason hails from Worcestershire, make it apparent that the book is at least partly autobiographical. Mitchell grew  up in the same West Midlands county, wrote under the pen-name James Bolivar, and, as those who heard him at the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival in 2004 will remember, speaks with  a stammer.

But there's nothing quotidian about the novel. Despite relying  on personal experiences, and sequential as the narrative may  be - starting in January 1982 and ending 12 months later - Mitchell packs much 'adventure' into one year in the life of his protagonist, who could otherwise be described as a member of a regular nuclear family in the quiet village of Black Swan Green.

Against a backdrop of the Falklands war, and to a particularly apt 1980s soundtrack (ELO, Talking Heads and Elvis Costello, among others), Jason experiences almost everything one would expect of teenage boys: he's in love (with  the girlfriend of the school bully) and he's being terrorised (by said tormentor). He also has an older sister, whom he tolerates, just, and friction is wearing out his parents.

So far, so normal. In the hands of a different novelist the story might simply be an average coming-of-age tale packaged as a  first novel. But Mitchell isn't just any writer, as the past seven years have shown. Since his debut with the dizzying Ghostwritten, which  A.S. Byatt described as 'the best [such book] I have ever read',  he's produced two Booker Prize-nominated tomes,  number9dream and  2004's Cloud Atlas, for which he created, among a clutch of disparate but connected tales,  a dystopic yarn about so-called fabricants who eat soap.

Readers who felt for the androids will no doubt root  for Jason: both have a human quality that elicits compassion. Not that he's a Hollywood version of the troubled kid done good. To Mitchell's credit, the protagonist is a believable, horny, self-important and conflicted teen. At the same time, he's a sensitive, vulnerable almost-adult. Just to appear cool, for instance, he alters his greetings ('Saying 'hello' to hard kids is gay so I just said, 'all right?''). And  just to avoid encounters with the 'hangman' (which is what he  calls his stammer), he substitutes vocabulary mid-sentence. 'S-consonant words're easier than  S-vowel words,' Jason explains, although the hangman can be capricious and cruel. In one painful episode, Jason says, 'I foundered for a killer put-down line without any stammer words in it and floundered and floundered.'

The novel consists of essentially chapter-length short stories starring Jason, a familiar cast  of family, friends and enemies,  plus cameo characters. Some  tales stand out more than others.  'Rocks', about his mother's garden rockery, will have readers dreading the inevitable as she builds what her husband believes to be a folly and fills it with expensive koi.  The fish last a day before they become breakfast for wild heron, prompting Jason to declare, after seeing his dad's look of victory, that 'not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right'.

'Spooks', like 'Goose Fair', portrays Jason as the quaking toughie with a heart of gold. Although satisfying in a moral way,  I wished that the author would allow his character to go against type at least once -  as Mitchell  has done.

But although he may have wrongfooted fans expecting the kind of postmodern literary pyrotechnics that have become  his trademark, there's much  that's undeniably Mitchell in  Black Swan Green. First is his intertextual reference to a character who appears in Cloud Atlas as the amanuensis for a famous composer. A neat gimmick in his other books, this time around it seems contrived. Then there's his inventiveness with words:  'she schwurked wine round her mouth'; 'out flubberdubbered a fart'.

Spotting Mitchell traits in Black Swan Green may be a kick. But it's best to read his fourth novel as if  it really were his first. That way readers don't waste time hunting for surprise manoeuvres and can immediately return to being 13 again, which, to borrow from one of the novel's characters, is such  'a wonderful, miserable age'.



Black Swan Green