A boy's own story

Published 24 April 2006

Black Swan Green David Mitchell Sceptre, 371pp, £16.99 ISBN 0340822791

David Mitchell is full of surprises. After formal complexities and exotic metafictions in Cloud Atlas and number9dream, his two Booker-nominated novels, he has come up with a straightforward kind of fictional memoir of adolescence in the Malvern Hills. Having tried on lots of voices for size, he seems to be toying here with an old version of his own. And so, oddly, it reads a bit more like a first novel than a fourth one.

The territory is familiar enough. It is 1982; Thatch is despatching our boys to the Falklands; jobs are being lost; a lot that was certain about Britain suddenly seems less so. Yet Jason Taylor, 13, is fretting mostly about what we imagine all 13-year-old boys to be fretting about: his place in the class pecking order, the irresistible forces of peer pressure, how exactly you go about becoming a teenager, and what precisely you have to say to girls to make them fancy you.

Jason tells the story of this world in sentences you might unearth in an old, top-secret exercise book: "Boys are bastards, but they're predictable bastards. You never know what girls're thinking. Girls are from another planet." The voice in his head, the voice of this book, is far more eloquent than the one he uses in public, however. He has a stammer, and that gets in the way of everything. In his head, the stammer has taken on the name and form of a Hangman, because it was while playing that blackboard game that the impediment first emerged. A lot of Jason's life now involves strategies to outwit the Hangman, who prevents him from saying words with "n" and words with "s". In his head, though, he has no such trouble.

Mitchell furnishes Jason's world, locked in Black Swan Green, a village in Worcestershire, with loving care. It is a place for "dossing about", and hedge-hopping, and saying "soz". It is perhaps inevitably reconstructed in part from the resonance of redundant brand names. There are broken Scalextrics and wheelies on Chopper bikes. The interior space of boyhood is just starting to be colonised by arcade games: Pac-Man and Frogger and Sinclair computers. Jason dreams of girls who smell of cinnamon Tic Tacs. He observes how Twiglets taste of spent matches dipped in Marmite. Aficionados of this era, and more particularly this genre - which notably includes Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club - will wait for the Arctic Rolls and Findus Crispy Pancakes to be served up for tea, and observe, perhaps not for the first time, how strange it is that butterscotch Angel Delight has become a madeleine cake to an entire generation of novelists who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s.

There are other voices in Jason's head, too, apart from the Hangman. There is the voice of the Unborn Twin, who tells him he is not good enough, that he should do better, that he is weak and childish. And there is the voice of the Maggot, which is sneaky and mischievous and tempts him towards the cruelty routinely exercised by his friends. There is a disruptive dream sequence, in which Jason breaks an ankle and is locked in a house in the woods with an old crone, a false-start device Mitchell used more tellingly in number9dream.

What Mitchell does show here is a very clear and poignant recollection of the priorities of adolescence: of not standing out from the crowd, of not being shown up by parents (Jason is bullied mercilessly after being spotted going to the cinema with his mother to see Chariots of Fire), of not being thought of as "gay". Almost anything can prompt this last, including reading ("books're gay").

The author has fun, too, coining some of the profundities of a 13-year-old: "Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice," Jason observes. Or: "Listening's reading if you close your eyes." Or: "War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery." This last one occurs when he hears that his friend's brother has been killed in the Falklands aboard HMS Coventry.

That death is about as close as Jason comes to reflecting on the wider history of his times. His self-absorption, rightly, knows no bounds. He sees Margaret Thatcher on television talking about playground bullies and the need for a nuclear deterrent, and immediately reflects on his own travails with Ross Wilcox at school. He writes secret poems in which he compares his parents arguing about the rockery to the engagements at Goose Green.

At times you have the sense that Mitchell wants his novel to be something more than an enjoyable exercise in recovered memory, that he wants it to be a Portrait of the Artist - its year-long trajectory shows Jason in search of, and finding, his voice through a certain amount of adversity - but too often, for all this, there is a slight Adrian Mole texture to it. By the end, when he has to confront the break-up of his parents' marriage, and when he stands up to his tormentors at school, Jason begins to realise that perhaps not everything in his life is as it has seemed. It is enjoyable to be in his head for a while, to follow his journey to this point, but, like many of the stories that boys tell themselves, it never wholly rings true.

Tim Adams writes for the Observer

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