Black Swan Green

So here I am, home sick all day. After a much needed nap right after breakfast (I helped the kids get off to school, kissed the wife goodbye, and settled in for a midwinter siesta), I woke with a passion to finish David Mitchell's Black Swan Green. I was nearly done with only a scant twenty pages to go, but I was too out of it last night to even attempt the last run, so I hunkered down under a blanket, cracked it open, and finished the darn thing. I was glad I did.

I wrote about David Mitchell's mind blowing Cloud Atlas last year, as it was my summer read, and waited until after Christmas to tackle his newest offering. School managed to keep me focused, but I just had to do it once 2007 flipped. And the results, after all that build up and anticipation, are mixed; kind of like waking up on Christmas morning and finding the package you had been waiting for all year, and finding it was as cool as you thought it would be, but then losing interest in it after oh, say, ten minutes of playing. It's kind of like that with this book.

I don't mean to disparage Mitchell. I still think he is one of the smartest writers writing now, and BSW does have its solid points. It is an accurate coming of age story. Jason Taylor's year long journey through the ups and downs, goods and bads, of life in a small Worcestershire village is incredibly similar to my own adolescence in Ravena. The issues he deals with- first kisses, drugs, bullies, embarrassing personal problems (Jason's a stutterer), sadistic school teachers, and his parents' divorce- is really reflective of the zeitgeist that was in the air during the early 1980's. It's pretty cool to hear it from a British perspective, and the homey British products that litter Jason's life add a nice air of the exotic, too.

I especially liked the interactions of the boys, which, being a thirteen year old once, struck me as very accurate. The evil Ross Wilcox, the loss of Tom Yew in the Falklands, and Jason's battle with "Hangman," the moniker he uses for his stutter, all accurately depict the world of the adolescent as it is, one fraught with dangers, joys, and matters of great sadness. Mitchell's verisimilitude, though, is a nice foil to the fantasy world of Jason and his escapist fantasy life. It is a nice balance, one that I can relate to ( I took a turn at poetry as a young man).

That said, I came to BSW with the expectation, perhaps wrongly, that it would blow me away like Cloud Atlas did. It's unfair to judge a book based on its predecessors, but we all do it. And, as you can guess, it didn't stun me like that book did. But the linguistic and stylistic virtuosity that was in the earlier text did pop up in spots in this book. Jason's poetic leaning and reflections was charming, and I really did enjoy the chapter that highlighted the verbal sparring between the protagonist and Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, herself a hold over from Cloud Atlas. Martin Frosbisher's Cloud Atlas Sextet also makes an appearance. Which tells me that Mitchell, as usual, has more going on than meets the eye. The last lines, spoken by Julia, are perhaps prophetic. She states, "It's not the end, yet."

OK, overall, a good read. Worth the time, if not as linguistically dazzling as Cloud Atlas. For the "traditional" linear readers, Mitchell is a good practitioner to settle in with.

Good reading. Back to work tomorrow.