Wonder year

The author of Cloud Atlas recreates the sense of wonder of his earlier works – and brings back some familiar characters – in a more intimate tale of a 13 year old boy's adventures in a quiet English village. By Nell FreudenbergerBLACK SWAN GREEN By David Mitchell. Random House, €25

David Mitchell's novels are full of ghosts. In his first novel, Ghostwritten, a “noncorpum” drifts restlessly around the world, possessing character after character, searching for a permanent home. Mitchell is so good at inhabiting other voices that halfway through his ambitious Cloud Atlas (2004) – the characters include a 19th-century traveler in the Chatham Islands and a genetically engineered slave in a futuristic Korean dystopia – I began to suspect that Mitchell himself might actually be a noncorpum, a spirit who has commandeered the body of a young Englishman to type out its books.
Anxious, perhaps, about being mistaken for a supernatural being, Mitchell set himself a different sort of challenge in his brilliant new novel, Black Swan Green. The book, set almost exclusively in a village of that name in quiet, provincial Worcestershire, follows 13 year old Jason Taylor through 13 months, each folded into a story-like chapter. This rigid structure provides a certain narrative freedom, and the episodes of Jason's life don't have snug resolutions. Mitchell's storytelling method feels appropriate to adolescence, when each month encompasses so many changes that experience hardly seems contiguous at all.
The challenge here, for Mitchell, is to recreate the sense of wonder of his earlier books in a more parochial setting, on a more intimate scale. It helps that Jason, his hero, has a similar affection for the exotic and otherworldly. He is drawn to the woods beside Black Swan Green, where Gypsies camp in the quarry, an old woman lives in an isolated, fairy tale house and the ghost of a drowned boy circles the frozen lake on skates. At the same time, he's bound to his family, who live in a new, upper-middle-class development near the village and suffer more ordinary problems. Jason, an aspiring poet, still vividly recalls the stories he heard as a child: his father's office reminds him of Bluebeard's chamber, where visitors wander at their peril. When he asks his talented but stifled mother what's for dinner, she snaps back: “Toad.” For a moment, Jason slips into the well of a fairy tale.
Black Swan Green is uneventful, at least in comparison with Mitchell's other books. The war in the Falklands briefly intrudes, but is over almost as soon as it begins; Jason understands its import only through the battles between his parents and the endless fighting among his schoolmates: “It's all ranks, being a boy, like the army.” Jason exists in the shadowy region of the not-popular-and-not-despised, but his place even there is threatened by a stammer he personifies as “Hangman”. When he's alone, an articulate internal monologue replaces the stammer; some of those thoughts are written down in poems he submits to the parish newsletter, which are published under the august pseudonym “Eliot Bolivar”.
Anyone who reads Mitchell will start to notice the characters who skip from book to book, remaining themselves but playing different roles. This technique is thematically appropriate to Black Swan Green, which is concerned with the repetition of language and experience. Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an aging Belgian aristocrat who takes an interest in Jason's poetry, was a teenager in Cloud Atlas. She introduces Jason to a new world of music and literature, including the genius Robert Frobisher (the most memorable character in Mitchell's last novel) and his forgotten “Cloud Atlas Sextet”.
“Recurrence is the heart of his music,” Madame Crommelynck tells Jason, and the same is obviously true of Mitchell. Short, lyrical sentences resonate in the novel, building to a kind of refrain. “Birdsong's the thoughts of a wood,” Jason thinks, and later: “Music's a wood you walk through.” That poetic diction is mixed with the ever-evolving slang of the schoolyard (where using an expression like “ace” or “epic” after its expiration date spells social death). In Jason, Mitchell creates an evocative yet authentically adolescent voice, an achievement even more impressive than the ventriloquism of his earlier books. It's characterised by unusual contractions, and his habit of using nouns as verbs: “Graveyards're sardined with rotting bodies.” Occasionally Jason's musings become a little too precociously poetic, but, then, he's that kind of kid.
Jason, left alone for a day, decides to follow Black Swan Green's bridle path to an old Roman tunnel rumoured to be in the Malvern Hills. His walk, a kind of odyssey, takes up an entire chapter: he watches a fight; encounters the girl of his 13 year old dreams; and spies on a pair of lovers in a field. The real things that happen on the bridle path are hard to distinguish from fantasies: “Here was a pruney man in a turquoise smock, about 20 paces up the bridle path.” (An escaped inmate from the Malvern asylum, who's stepped into a swarm of bees.) “Here was the dirt-smeared corpse of a boy my age.” (His friend Dean, who has hidden in order to scare him.) Dangers pop up like enemies in a video game; Jason's adolescent credulity makes him the perfect narrator for a novel about the line between the fabulous and the real.
Mitchell has, in his previous novels, resorted to farce whenever he writes about England or typically English characters, and I was worried when Jason and Dean stumble out of the woods onto the lawn of the lunatic asylum. (An asylum caper figured prominently in Cloud Atlas, and even here Mitchell can't resist the schtick of an inmate dressed up in her keeper's uniform.) Almost immediately, however, he curbs his satirical impulse, and this chapter ends with the madwoman letting out a powerful scream: even if you'd “clambered into the lost tunnel, in that booming hollowness, deep beneath the Malvern Hills, even there, for sure, this tail-chasing wail'll find you, absolutely, even there.”
Rather than providing an escape, the magic in Black Swan Green eventually intersects with ordinary life. The Gypsies are threatened by bigoted villagers; Madame Crommelynck is deported; and the old woman who scared Jason with the story of the drowned skater moves out of the woods, to a “granny flat” across the road. Her son-in-law tells him that the whole wood is only “two or three footy pitches, tops”, as if Jason should've known. And yet it's the granny who helps him understand how he might finally banish Hangman forever. The woods may have gotten smaller, but Jason would stop listening to their music at his peril.
Novelists today sometimes seem a little sanctimonious about the importance of characterisation in fiction. Even Mitchell, who takes greater formal and intellectual risks than most of his contemporaries, has said, “Ideas are well and good, but without characters to hang them on, fiction falls limp.” It's true that you don't care about a book like Cloud Atlas chiefly because it manages to analyse a century and a half of exploitation in societies from Europe to the South Pacific. But as a reader, I don't want to be without the verbal play and inventiveness of the generation that came before Mitchell's. There has got to be a way to write fiction that pays attention to people at the same time that it represents the breadth and complexity of the kinds of societies we live in now. Mitchell is the rare novelist who makes me see that path clearly: it starts among suburban houses, passes through a meadow where boys are fighting, and somewhere up ahead leads into a shrinking wood, populated by ghosts on skates, lunatic beekeepers and Gypsies crouched around a dying fire.
© 2006 The New York Times