Black Swan Green
David Mitchell, 2006
Summary
Chapter 1: January man
Jason Taylor is a 13-year-old with a stammer in the small village of Black Swan Green in Worcestershire. The first chapter starts with a rule Jason’s father has: “Do not set foot in my office” and Jason breaking that rule to pick up the phone. It also introduces Jason’s older sister Julia, friend Dean “Moron” Moran, popular boy Nick Yew, Gilbert “Yardy” Swinyard, Ross Wilcox and his cousin Gary Drake, golden boy student Neal Brose, tomboy Dawn Madden, Mervyn “Squelch” Hill, bully Grant Burch, local legend Tom Yew and “less shiny legend” Pluto Noak. Jason secretly publishes his poems in the Black Swan Green Parish magazine under the alias “Eliot Bolivar”. Jason breaks his grandfather’s expensive Omega Seamaster De Ville watch. Also, after an accident on an iced-over lake, he meets a mysterious old woman rumoured to be a witch.
Chapter 2: Hangman
Jason goes into more detail about his struggles with stammering. He then explains how his stammers affect his relationships with other people. He refers to this mental block as “hangman”. He’s scared to stand up and speak during the school’s weekly rhetoric session, but is saved by a call from his South African speech therapist, Mrs. de Roo. He calls his stammer “Hangman”
Chapter 3: Relatives
Introduces Jason’s relatives who come for a visit, including cool, 15-year-old cousin Hugo Lamb (who reappears in Mitchell’s later novel The Bone Clocks), who pressures Jason to try his first cigarette.
Chapter 4: Bridle path
Jason is attacked by dobermans and scolded by their owner. When he comes across he meets his classmates Kit Harris, Grant Burch, Philip Phelps and Ant Little. A fight between Burch and Wilcox ends with the former breaking his right wrist. Jason encounters Dawn Madden, a girl he has a crush on. She treats him like a dog. Escaping up a tree, Jason witnesses Tom Yew, on leave from the Navy, make love to Debby Crombie.
Chapter 5: Rocks
This chapter explores Jason’s perspective on the growing British instability in the Falklands War and arguments between his mother and father. Tom Yew is killed when his ship, HMS Coventry, is bombed by Skyhawks. Eventually, a ceasefire is declared.
Chapter 6: Spooks
Jason’s mother takes up an interest in running an art gallery part-time. Jason finds an invitation to join the Spooks, a local secret society made up of Noak, Burch, Swinyard, Peter Redmarley and John Tookey. Jason and Moran are challenged with making it through six back gardens in 15 minutes. Jason makes it with ten seconds to spare, but his friend Moran is injured when he falls through a greenhouse.
Chapter 7: Solarium
Jason receives an invitation from the publisher of his poems. The real benefactor is revealed to be Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck (a much younger version of whom also has a part in Cloud Atlas). She conducts sessions with him, offering constructive criticisms of his poems. Crommelynck is soon extradited as a result of her husband’s financial scams in Germany.
Chapter 8: Souvenirs
Jason goes on two trips: one with his father for a work event, another with his mother to her job at Yasmin Morton-Bagot’s gallery. During his trip with his father, Jason is taken to get fish and chips by Danny Lawlor, a man who works under his father at Greenland. He later meets his father’s boss, Craig Salt. Jason’s mother takes over as manager of Yasmin Morton-Bagot’s gallery, La Boite aux Mille Surprises. Jason and his mother prevent a trio of girls stealing items from the store. His mother decides to take him to see Chariots of Fire, an act which gets noticed by people from his school.
Chapter 9: Maggot
Wilcox and Drake make fun of Jason for going to the cinema with his mother. Wilcox starts calling him “maggot”, a name which grows within the school. The entire school is punished because Wilcox and his group berate a teacher. Jason meets Holly Deblin, who tells him, “You’re not a maggot. Don’t let dickheads decide what you are.” Wilcox and his group jump Jason after school and Jason tries to stands up for himself, but fails. The bullies throw Jason’s backpack atop the school bus’ roof as it drives off. Jason catches up to the bus, the driver Norman Bates asks why Jason allows himself to be bullied. Bates urges that Jason attack Wilcox with a knife. Upon hearing this, Jason says that if he did he’d “get sent to Borstal.” Norman Bates replies, “Life’s a Borstal!”
Chapter 10: Knife grinder
A gypsy knife grinder visits Jason’s house, offering his services. Jason does not let him in. Jason and his father attend a village meeting to decide what to do about a proposed gypsy encampment. After several speeches, a fire alarm is pulled, causing minor panic. Moran’s father reveals to Jason that his grandfather was a gypsy. Through a series of events Jason finds himself in the gypsy camp.
Chapter 11: Goose fair
Jason finds Wilcox’s lost wallet, containing six hundred pounds, at the fair. After some encounters in the fairground he decides to give it back. Wilcox breaks up with Madden and finds her sleeping with Burch. In shock, Wilcox steals Tom Yew’s Suzuki and crashes it, losing part of his right leg.
Chapter 12: Disco
It is learned that Jason’s father lost his job. Jason crushes Brose’s calculator in a vice. After being taken to the Principal’s office, Jason reveals that Brose has been running an extortion scheme intimidating other boys in his year for money. Brose is expelled. It is learned that Jason was kicked out of the Spooks. Miss Lippetts delivers a class about secrets and the ethics of revealing them. During the dance, Jason kisses Deblin. He reveals to his father that he broke the watch and his father reveals that he’s been having an affair and is divorcing Jason’s mother.
Chapter 13: January man
Taking place two weeks later, Jason reminisces around the village one final time before leaving. The mystery phone calls were from Jason’s father’s mistress, Cynthia. He has stopped writing poems for the parish magazine.
Some Thoughts
At this point, I think David Mitchell could do anything fiction-wise. Black Swan Green, eschewing the grandiose narrative and temporal sweeps of his other novels, concerns a 13 year old Jason Taylor coming of age, as 13 year old boys are wont to do, amidst the backdrop of the dissolution of his parent’s marriage in a small town in Worcestershire, UK. The book spans 13 chapters, each a well-hewn vignette of gained experience, each a step towards that age that Jason Taylor is coming to. The book does what no other Mitchell novel has so far, which is constrain itself to a single narrator in a confined timeline. In Jason Taylor, Mitchell finds an authentic voice, in part perhaps because this is Mitchell’s most autobiographical novel (as if any novel couldn’t be said to be pulled from some experience), Mitchell having shared the same vocal falterings as Jason Taylor (heretofore JT). At times this veers into the preternaturally precocious. What 13 year old kid might say “a brick of loneliness is reaching terminal velocity inside me”? Mitchell brings a little more realism when he has JT declare “This druid feeling I get in the woods’s so thrilling it makes me want to crap”.
When I was younger and I was just learning how to play the guitar, I remember hearing Stevie Ray Vaughan and thinking to myself that what he did sounded easy to do. Took me 6 months of playing to disabuse me of the notion that that primal cement mixer sound of Stevie’s was anything easy to create. I feel the same way with Mitchell – the uniformity and unrelenting authenticity of his prose, the cleverness of the structure evinced by genre, the risks, the performance, all are so hard to do on their own, and within Mitchell you find an author who can hit the lexical equivalent of 6 octaves. The only criticism you might levy is Mitchell is too good, him a basso, his voice echoing underneath the text, so you get Mitchell as a 13 year old boy, Mitchell as a Dutch clerk, Mitchell as an older publisher. That sort of criticism only stands because we expect so much out of Mitchell. I know whatever he writes I will be picking up, rapt.