Set in the early 1980’s, Black Swan Green is the tale of a year in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor. Jason lives in a Worcestershire village and suffers from a stammer which makes his school life difficult – he is permanently afraid of it being discovered by his class-mates, and uses a variety of strategies to avoid words that might trip him up. The prospect of public speaking fills him with dread.
Jason gives different elements of his personality their own names and to an extent their own identities. Externalising these parts of his personality help him face his fears. His stammer is ‘the hangman’ for example, showing how fearful he is of having his condition ‘exposed’.
This is not just the story of Jason and his stammer. Much of the narrative revolves around his relationships with his peer group at school and time spent just hanging around the village. It quickly becomes apparent that the mundane challenges of day to day life as a teenager in a small English village in the 1980s are of quite limited interest, unless the nostalgic references to 80’s popular culture appeal. Jason has what are presented in his account as adventures (he falls over while skating, he is barked at by some fierce dogs, he goes for a long walk), and no doubt to him that’s what they seem, but they are not much more than everyday events with little in the way of drama. The only event that really stands out occurs when he meets an eccentric European woman Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck who robustly critiques his poetry but still encourages his aspirations to be a poet. Eva seems out of place in rural Worcestershire, and disappears from the narrative as abruptly as she appears, extradited as a result of her husband’s dodgy financial affairs.
Black Swan Green is a slightly less funny version of the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 and 3/4. Admittedly there are a few differences between the two novels, in setting and tone, but the extent of the similarities is striking. The central characters are the novels’ naïve teenage narrators. They are the same age. Their parents are both splitting up, although Adrian/Jason comes to realise this a lot later than the reader. They both secretly write poetry. Both take a superficial interest in current affairs, in particular the Falklands War, and along with all teenage boys have crushes on young women. Both are embarrassed to be seen with their parents. Both their fathers are laid off. I could go on – but while Adrian Mole is played for laughs, while at the same time serving as an acute observation of the anguish of teenage life, Black Swan Green is a lot less funny.
So why did the author of the complex, modernist/experimental novels such as Cloud Atlas write a unfunny version of Adrian Mole? I am genuinely puzzled? Of course there is a strong autobiographical element to Black Swan Green, and the similarities with Sue Townsend’s creation may be coincidental (none of the dozens of reviews I read on Goodreads noticed the parallels, so maybe it’s just me?) but this was a surprisingly below par effort from Mitchell. I’ve been fairly critical of the tone of some of his other novels – Slade House for example was in part in poor taste – and the handling of the supernatural elements was unconvincing, but there was no question of his abilities as an author, in crafting compelling stories and characters. Black Swan Green isn’t a young adult novel, or at least it’s not marketed as such, but it might play better to that audience that to readers of his more mature fiction.
The Reading Bug 