I Was Blind In 1979; By ’82 I Had Clues

Set during the year I was born, David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green manages to be both a warm study of the pitfalls of early adolescence and a chilling, dreamlike rendition of small-town prejudices and improvident karma. The prose, appropriately for a narrator who is a budding, if secret, poet, is rich, rewarding, and filled with novel imagery and turns of phrase that raise either a smile or an appreciative eyebrow.

At times, the novel reads like a cheery burst of 80s nostalgia, a litany of carefully researched LPs and Christmas gifts – albeit a nostalgia that recognises and despises the brutal, venomous rulers of the comprehensive school playground. At others, it takes on the attitude of a Lynchean fever dream: the souls of drowned boys deliver a twisted ankle as payment for a midnight skate on the ice; the woods are filled with strange characters and their stranger, larger dogs; an aged Belgian woman discusses poetry over several weeks before being extradited as a Nazi; the protagonist communes with nature and decides on his future career while taking a shit in the woods. These incursions of the strange at once throw the daily horrors of the bullied underclass into sharp relief, pointing out that school cannot last for ever, and there there are far worse and better things out in the world – while also, with their dreamlike trappings and frequent disappearances, highlighting that this life of pain and bullying is all that is real.

Reading novels set in this period – and in this year, 1982, especially – is a somewhat bizarre experience for me, as despite being alive, I was probably either suckling, sleeping or bawling at the time. Or possibly still in the womb. Thanks to Adrian Mole (which Black Swan Green can’t help but remind me of, with its put-upon, outsider protagonist, fractured family dynamic and first fumbling forays into adolescence) Private Eye, and The Year You Were Born, though, I often feel that I know more about what was happening in the early 80s than I do the early 90s, when I read those books for the first time. Reading Black Swan Green is like sparking nostalgia for nostalgia – it’s reminiscent of a reminscence.

Mitchell has clearly developed a talent for narrative suspension during the writing of his prior novel, Cloud Atlas, which was built around the gimmick that it was essentially six meta-fictional novellas stapled together in the centre, which meant that readers had to keep the beginnings of at least five stories aloft until they resolved themselves on the other side of the fold. Black Swan Green, too, hefts several storyarcs and mysteries into the sky at the outset of the novel and does not return to them until the closing pages of the book – leaving their soft menace to permeate the rest of the tale without the subplots they have generated having to make more than a passing appearance.

There are some beautiful, brilliant touches here – on top of well-realised characters and a sad, yet recognisable family dynamic, there are excellent scenes that sit in a perfectly recaptured representation of place and era, and which flit between the hilarious and the deeply moving (witness our narrator’s separate holidays with his mother and father).

However, there are several moments when Mitchell just cannot resist the odd overly-cute element of foreshadowing – whether it’s talking about future attitudes to the Falklands War, a character wishing twenty years of Thatcher on the country, or any number of smaller asides, these ananchronistic wink-and-nods are the bane of any work of historical or nostalgic fiction. I realise the temptation to include them must be great, but they serve less as clever-clever jokes and more a giant boot to kick you straight out of the narrative.

Still, a terrific novel that is well worth a gander. (Or a signet?)

Black Swan Green at Amazon