Black Swan Green: Longlisted for the Booker Prize

A backwater of a village somewhere in Middle England during the early 1980’s, the sort of place where the only thing that ever happens, is nothing. Even so Jason Taylor, the teenage protagonist of Mitchell’s novel has plenty of problems, from coping with his stammer and hiding the fact that he writes poetry, to balancing on the cliff edge of adolescence.
Starting in the summer of 1982 the book tells the story of eighteen months when, to borrow a phrase from Lenin, a whole decade happens all in one mad rush. International events in the shape of the Falklands War, family discord and the travails caused by raging hormones all conspire to ensure that for Jason nothing will ever be the same.
The recent past is a notoriously difficult thing for a novelist to get right, proximity makes most of us pocket experts primed to point out the smallest of flaws. That it gets over this first, and largest, hurdle so effortlessly is just one of the things that makes Black Swan Green so enjoyable.
Mitchell captures perfectly the world as it was in 1982, from the ghastly good taste on show when Jason’s parents entertain their in-laws, to the TV shows his characters watch and the songs playing in the background. Creating a faux placid front behind which unseen tensions can bubble inexorably towards boiling point.
Even more impressive is the unsparingly accurate way he writes about the curious anthropology of boyhood. Every detail from the games played to the slang used is unfailing accurate to the period. Sometimes embarrassingly so to readers old enough to have grown up in the eighties. Revealing as it does prejudices that are not excused by being received second hand from adults and the bewildering and often inhibiting unspoken rules by which being a ‘proper’ boy was defined.
In Jason Taylor Mitchell has created the perfect central character to navigate this strange world. Smart enough to be that little bit more self-aware that his contemporaries, yet tight bound by his insecurities to the omerta of boyhood that makes his horizon almost as narrow as theirs. At the heart of this novel is the story of how he starts to learn the lifelong balancing act between who society expects you to be and who you really are.
A book like this always runs the risk of being either cloyingly nostalgic, like one of those television programs where men of a certain age drone on about Spangles or being jealous of the boy up the street because he had a Raleigh Chopper, or painfully arch about how awful we were way back when. Instead, it rings brilliantly true with the pathos and slapstick of life.
Adam Colclough