David as the Goliath

There is no other way, he is ashamed of it: 8220;Makes me shrivel up like a plastic wrapper in a fire.8221; As it turns out, Jason is a keen observer and has also envisaged how he must be looking to people around him: 8220;8230; when people stammer, they go trem-bly- red like an evenly matched arm wrestler, and their mouth gupper-gupperguppers like a fish in a net. It must be quite a funny sight.8221;

Soon enough, a game is born in his mind8230; the stammer is a mon-ster, of course. He christens him Hangman whose fingers 8220;sink in-side my tongue and squeeze my windpipe so nothing8217;ll work.8221; If this wasn8217;t bad enough, Jason has to contend with bullies, a dysfunc-tional family his parents are split-ting up, a difficult sister and his own demons.

He feels small and miserable. This is no precocious teenager we have met before. He is no Holden Caulfield or Seymour Glass J D Salinger. Even his creative bursts of poetry under the pseudonym Eliot Bolivar, are well, not quite there: 8220;Petalled stars and dandelion comets streak the green universe8221;.

Neither is his affected prose: 8220;My eye spidered over my poster of black an- gelfish turning into white swans, across over my map of Middle-earth, around my door frame, into my cur-tains, lit fiery mauve by my spring sun, and fell down the well of dazzle. Listening to houses breathe makes you weightless.8221;

But that8217;s what makes Jason so endearing 8212; how he desperately tries to make his life less ordinary, and often fails. Because life8217;s like that. So, we smile at his first kiss, we suffer when he does because a sol-dier is killed in the Falklands War this is a Thatcher year and nothing is as it seems, we are sorry when he begins to find out his family is disin-tegrating and refuses to accept it.

What8217;s incredible about Mitchell is that he wraps a simple story in a clever form and it8217;s nothing like the complicated structures of his three previous novels though this one is episodic too, each chapter taking a month of a year of Jason8217;s life. So, the first chapter, when we meet Jason just before his 13th birthday is called January Man. Ditto the last one, set just before he will turn 14.

Through the year, he will stumble through one crisis, some high points a pat on his back for his poetry and many lowpoints. Trying his best not to be branded gay because he writes poems, when his sister tells him, 8220;It8217;ll be all right,8221; in the end, he will retort: 8220;It doesn8217;t feel very all right.8221; To which his sister will tell him wisely: 8220;That8217;s because it8217;s not the end.8221;

It8217;s not the end for Mitchell either, of course. But first he must en-counter the Booker shortlist out September 14, and then the Man Booker prize night October 10.