David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
I hadn't gotten around to David Mitchell before the Beer & Books Club chose Cloud Atlas in 2012, then Utopia Avenue in 2022 (which I'm surprised that I didn't post about here), and to be honest, I'd loosely categorized him as "appreciated, but not enough": I wasn't looking to read another Mitchell novel.
The thumbnail of this book is pretty straightforward: a resentfully sensitive 13-year-old boy living in an English village in 1983 lives through almost everything that made it so shit to be a 13-year-old boy living in an English village in 1983. We share a birth year, me and Jason Taylor, so even though rural British Columbia of the time had little in common with a Worcestershire village, I felt I understood him pretty viscerally. If I wasn't of the same age, would I have felt as connected to the book and its characters? Hmm.
Anyway, it's an episodic novel, with little clarity about how much time passes between episodes. When it opens, Jason's parents are in a marriage under strain; his sister will be leaving for university at the end of the school year; his stuttering is getting worse; and he's gradually falling through the social strata of kids in the village toward the doom of getting constantly picked on. Each chapter tends to present additional complications and degradations, either for Jason or for someone he cares for, but he gets increasingly self-aware and increasingly understanding of the world around him--
--well, not of girls, obviously that's impossible, I mean he's 13, and even when he's older, he'll still find that they're--
--so much so that we see him starting to develop what we might think of as some classic Gen X feelings about the idiocies of racism, misogyny, violence, that sort of thing. Obviously those things have remained fascinating for many Gen X folk, as for other members of other generations, and the concept of "generations" is a fiction anyway, or cruel self-serving bigots like Trump and Poilievre wouldn't hold the power that they do in 2026, but that's not my Gen X.
My point, simply, is that it was a mixed joy to hear from Jason Taylor in detail about 1983, the year he was 13, in the village of Black Swan Green, Worcestershire. It was painful for him and for so many of those around him, including his enemies, because life was awful for a great many people then (as it is now, though differently), but as the song says, it was something like coming home to a place I'd never been before.
Highly recommended, but only for a small group of readers!
Comments