BLACK SWAN GREEN, BY DAVID MITCHELL

Yes, more David Mitchell. This one’s set in England, early eighties, concerning young boys. Or perhaps a young boy. Not entirely sure yet.

Done

Ah, yet another wonderful little trip to Mitchelland. I actually finished this a few weeks ago, so if I ever had anything interesting to say about it I’ve long since forgotten it. I still have my bookmark, the back of a shred of a flyer advocating Wells Fargo Credit Monitoring on which I scrawled various page numbers and passages in various pens and colors, but mostly they’re just bits I found amusing.

Once again I think Mitchell took a profoundly important subject (growing up) that has been endlessly trampled and flagellated, picked it up, brushed it off, gave it a shower, and made it shine and gallop. There’s nothing terribly original about dealing with bullies, watching your parents’ marriage disintegrate, learning how and when to fit in, etc., but entwined in Mitchell’s magical prose these things take on new luster.

The book is replete with things that make me happy: bizarre characters, passages of hilarity, plots and intrigue, even nods to the author’s previous books! Eva Crommelynck from Cloud Atlas shows up to guide our young protagonist in his poetic development. She’s described as “an unnumbered dot-to-dot.”

I guess I enjoyed this more for style than anything else. It was just such a pleasure to read. However, like music, I don’t quite see the point in describing how wonderful it is when the text can speak for itself. As our young lad says himself,

Teachers’re always using that ‘in your own words.’ I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It’s their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily?

So here are a few more passages that might convince you that this is a book worth your time.

Jason’s school bus driver might be one of the funniest minor characters in the book:

Norman bates is one of those cracked stone men you shouldn’t mess with. One time, Pluto Noak opened the emergency exit for a doss. Norman Bates went to the back, grabbed him, dragged him to the front, and literally chucked him off the bus. Pluto Noak cried up from his ditch, ‘I’m taking you to court I am! You bust me flamin’ arm!’

Norman Bates’s reply was to remove his cigarette from the corner of his mouth, lean down the steps of his bus, stick out his tongue like a Maori, and stub out the still-glowing cigarette, slow and deliberate, actually on his tongue. We head the hiss. The man flicked the stub at the boy in the ditch.

Then Norman Bates sat down and drove off.

Nobody’s touched the fire door on his bus since that day.

Ok, a little more Norman:

‘Some boys’ – I fought for breath – ‘chucked my bag on the roof.’

The kids on the bus lit up with excitement.

‘What roof?’

‘The roof of your bus.’

Norman Bates gave me a look like I’d shat in his burger. But he swung down, nearly knocking me over, jumped down, marched to the end of the bus, climbed up the back-end monkey ladder, grabbed my Addidas bag, lobbed it at me, and climbed back down to the road. ‘Yer mates’re a bunch o’wankers, sunbeam.’

‘They’re not my mates.’

‘Then why let ‘em push you around?’

‘I don’t let them. There’s five of them. Ten of them. More.’

Norman Bates sniffed. “But only one King Turd, right?’

‘One or two.’

‘One’ll do. What yer need is one of these little beauties.’ A lethal Bowie knife suddenly rotated in front of my eyes. ‘Sneak up on King Turd.’ Norman Bates’s voice softened. ‘And slice – his – tendons. One slit, two slit, tickle him under there. If he fucks around with you after that, just puncture the tires on his wheelchair.’ Norman Bates’s knife disappeared into thin air. ‘Army and navy surplus store. Best tenner you’ll ever spend.’

‘But if I slice Wilcox’s tendons, I’d get sent to Borstal.’

‘Well wakey fucking wakey, sunbeam! Life‘s fucking Borstal!’

Jason stammers. He personifies his stammer as Hangman. Also, did I mention there are all manner of totally awesome Britishisms throughout the book? This might be the most British paragraph ever:

‘Why’d you’ – Hangman blocked ‘nick,’ then ‘steal,’ so I had to use the naff ‘pinch’ – ‘pinch the fags?’ I wanted to scarper away from the crime scene as quick as possible, but a slow queue of traffic’d built up behind a tractor, so we couldn’t cross the crossroads yet.