by JULIET WATERS

“Black Swan Green may not be the arsehole of the world,” says a world-weary teenager in David Mitchell’s fourth novel, “but it’s got a damn good view of it.” Same could be said of 13, the age of Jason Taylor, Mitchell’s hero. It might not always be the worst year of anyone’s life, but it’s got a very good view of the worst life has to offer: the pressure to conform, the implicit and explicit brutality that keeps the pecking order in place, the pain of desire, disappointment and betrayal and the false identities people create to make it manageable. For bright kids it’s the age at which they generally learn how valued intelligence and sensitivity are in our culture: not a lot.

This is especially true in the time and place where Black Swan Green is set, a smallish village in Margaret Thatcher’s England. Mitchell’s follow-up to his virtuoso literary performance, Cloud Atlas, has surprised critics and readers. Generally considered an engaging, if lightweight genius, Mitchell’s capacity to impersonate a remarkable range of characters and literary styles seems to spark almost as much suspicion as awe. A relatively straightforward, possibly autobiographical coming-of-age novel told in 13 interconnected short stories is like David Foster Wallace suddenly writing the contemporary boy version of Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women.

Anyone familiar with the Canadian classic will recognize the feel of that world, the universal themes screwed in tight by the dramatic, near gothic tensions of rural living. But while Munro’s tour de force followed a girl from puberty to young adulthood, Mitchell’s stories follow a boy in a more tightly focused time line.

Each story is set in a different month from 1982. Elvis Costello still with the Attractions, the Falklands war, Chariots of Fire, the first rounds of the corporate layoffs that were not always a fact of life—these are the background of Jason’s struggle for survival.

Boys in the kind of comprehensive, mixed-class school Jason attends don’t need a class on Lord of The Flies. In this early prototype of the exurb, Jason lives in a middle-class compound with his management class parents and goes to school with resentful locals. Doing his best to decode the ways of adolescent boys, he has two terrible secrets that, once public, will be the baby steps to his crucifixion. He has a speech impediment and a gift for poetry.

Jason chooses words the way children on the other side of the world learn to navigate minefields. Some words tempt the “hangman,” the internal gremlin that brings on his stutter. Some words mark him as precocious and may alert a gang of sadistic bullies that he is not the “middle-range” kid he pretends to be. In school he would rather give the wrong answer than the wrong word.

But other children are hardly the only soul murderers here. Teachers, his parents, relatives and the other village denizens are relentlessly ineffectual. Even an ageing bohemian (a character recycled from Cloud Atlas) who instructs him in the fundamental choices between true art and fraudulent impression turns out to have a suspicious ethical pedigree.

Black Swan Green is dark, funny and true, despite some pretty stock coming-of-age subplots (weird for someone as innovative as Mitchell). It will hopefully go on to become the classic it is being labelled as. But as much as it is a study of a certain time and age, this is certainly not the only place in the world

where the anonymous, middling bystanders’ role is rarely seen as a devastating ethical choice. The era Mitchell brings to life might not be our own disappointing era, but for anyone who wants to see the allegorical levels of this story, it’s got a damn good view of it.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell,
Knopf Canada, hc, 294pp, $29.95