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Journalism of Courage
SPEAKING WELL IS THE SAME AS commanding,8221; mulls 13-year-old Jason Taylor, the protagonist of David Mitchell8217;s latest novel. If this is true, Jason doesn8217;t see himself occupying a position of authority any time soon. He has a stammer-ing problem: an imp he calls Hangman blocks certain words, which means he has to constantly plan and alter what he says. 8220;I envy people who can say sentences as they think them,8221; he sighs.
Hangman isn8217;t Jason8217;s only nemesis. Grow-ing up in a small Worcestershire village in 1982, he must contend with other bogeymen of adolescence: bullies at school; news of the Falklands War; the cracks developing in his parents8217; marriage. Black Swan Green gives us the many shades of this world through a se-ries of events that occur over a year.
Any book written by an adult, for adults, but in the voice of a child, requires a certain suspension of disbelief, no matter howskilled the author or howprecocious his young pro-tagonist.
Children are usually too busy living their lives, dealing with strange new ideas and experiences every day, to be able to see the Larger Picture or to articulate it in meaningful ways 8212; and so, inevitably, certain passages read like a retrospective, rather than first-hand, account of childhood. Intelligent as Ja-son undoubtedly is, his musings on life don8217;t always ring true 8220;The truth is, jumping in at deep ends causes drowning. Baptisms of fire cause third-degree burns8221;.
But Mitchell, in his mid-30s and already a modern master, easily overcomes this challe-nge. What gives this book resonance is his un-erring sense of how intense, lonely and fright-ening the world can be for a sensitive child.
Black Swan Green is vivid in its portrayal of children8217;s cruelty to each other, the often un-reasonable power wielded by adults, and how concentrated a child8217;s life can become when things go wrong 8212; how it feels like the whole world is participating in your humiliation. Mitchell8217;s last book was the sprawling, im-mensely ambitious Cloud Atlas. Reading Black Swan Green, one senses that he wanted to prove he could write a straightforward narrative with equal conviction. But it isn8217;t as sim-ple as it first appears: there are subtle shifts in tone from one chapter to the next and the story, coloured as it is by Jason8217;s fantasies, can8217;t always be taken at face value 8212; witness, for instance, the bifurcated chapter where he spends time with each of his parents in turn while they go about their professional work.
However, Mitchell8217;s talent for producing one memorable character after another, like a magician with an endless supply of rabbits, is intact. He packs in such a wealth of detail and characterisation that it8217;s hard to believe this book is under 400 pages in length. Black Swan Green is a great coming-of-age novel, and one that deserves much more than a sin-gle reading.
