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David Mitchell's previous two novels were nominated for the Booker Prize. He's intelligent and daring, beloved of critics and popular, too (a winner of the Richard and Judy Award for best read of the year, no less). The boy can do no wrong - as this, his fourth novel, confirms.
A clever epithet for Black Swan Green (Sceptre, £16.99) is Bildungsroman, the chronicle of a young mind's development. But that's too self-important a term to capture the flavour of what Mitchell (right) has created. It's a beautifully simple and unpretentious description of what it was like to be an ordinary schoolboy in the early 1980s.
The narrator is Jason Taylor, a 13-year-old with a stammer growing up in a small village in Worcestershire. Taking in bullying, the Falklands War, domestic upheavals, and the first buds of sexual awakening, the story
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‘Black Swan Green’ by David Mitchell is a haunting elegy for a 1980s childhood, says tim auld
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charts Jason's transformation from impressionable youth - subject to the pressures of his peers, the squabbles of his parents, the jingoistic reports of journalists, and the terrors of self-doubt - into self-assured young man.
It's a time-honoured transformation, but none the worse for that; and the impeccable accuracy with which Mitchell recalls the era's slang ("spaz", "skill", "flob") and cultural detritus (Raleigh Grifters, Curly Wurlys and Betamax) strikes a hauntingly elegiac note.
It will toll like a bell for thirty-somethings who had the world before them back then, and now face the depredations of middle age. But if you want to remember how long a summer's day once was, how good a Double Decker tasted, and the moment the gates of Eden closed behind you, you could do worse than venture into Black Swan Green.
FIRST
POSTED APRIL 11, 2006
Escalator by Michael Gardiner
Everyman by Philip Roth
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