Black Swan Green

Title: “Black Swan Green”
Author: David Mitchell
ISBN: 0-340-83926-0
Published: Hodder & Stoughton
2006
Book quote:

“Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you look at green, where’ve the yellow and the blue gone? Somehow this is to do with Moran’s dad. Somehow this is to do with everyone and everything.”

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Black Swan Green is nothing if not beautifully fashioned. 13 chapters depict 13 months in the life of Jason Taylor, himself 13 years old.


As a coming of age novel, it’s absolute. The trials of adolescence encompass, by definition, everything life has to offer: family friction and lasting issues of origin, love and relationships, power, struggle for supremacy, comradeship and the nature of friendship, betrayal, the overturning of fundamental beliefs and values, disillusionment, realisation of parental fallibility, despair, hope, and much more. Black Swan Green covers them all; I felt I had endured every agonising detail over again.

Possibly one of this novel’s most lasting glories is its portrayal of 80s in Britain. The Falkland’s war takes a central position in the plot, along with the Thatcher ethos and the fragments of its downfall. The war, its causes and its solution are not only linked but absolutely welded to the other central theme of the book: ‘bullying’, in its very widest sense. What can one get away with saying and doing, and why, on both an individual and a national level? As the children explain it: “you can’t say that because it’s gay”. The adults say exactly the same thing in media spins and political manifestos. Jason’s cousin, Hugo, bullies his own brother, manipulating Jason into culpability to ensure compliance. Jason’s own father habitually psychologically bullies Jason’s mother by insisting on his supremacy as the breadwinner – though we are pointedly shown that the mother is perfectly capable of being a breadwinner herself but has deferred to him. For this picture, Julia, Jason’s sister, is the foil and mirror. She has inherited her mother’s brain but is not hampered by the sexual mores that her mother is – the result is portrayed as almost two-dimensionally positive. Bullying is a very effective personification for the 80s in Britain, and Mitchell makes the very best of it.


The central character of Jason is hugely sympathetic, with his over-active brain and precocious vocabulary, his terrors of (and battles with) social isolation, his psychological incarceration by the fear of stuttering, his moral crises and simple, delightful adolescent exuberance. The very scent of 80s pubescent life comes wafting through the changing-rooms in through the pages of this book, and it’s mesmerising.