REVIEW: Black Swan Green

Toe-Sock takes on the kunstlerroman

*Fine as a stolen pack of L & B ciggies*

You don’t need a roving band of gypsies to tell you that growing up means feeling out of place all the time, but David Mitchell’s excellent fourth novel has this and then some.

The story of a British child-poet’s emergence into adolescence during the early 1980’s, Black Swan Green belongs to a genre that English geeks call kunstlerroman, German for “Artist’s Novel.” This type of novel, epitomized by James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, follows a young person’s development into an artist through his curious rejection and infatuation with commonplace life. Within the belly of said beast, a reader will generally find the protagonist doing most of the following:

a) Protagonist comes to terms with himself in regards to others. This most often entails the child realizing he is a bit different than most other people. He is treated accordingly (i.e. rottenly).

b) Protagonist comes to terms with his society in regards to the world. Youth realizes Britain/Ireland/Mozambique is not the end all of humanity, that nationalism is well and good, but blind nationalism is fatal foolishness. (Incidentally, I use the masculine pronoun simply because Mitchell's protagonist is male. Not because I believe artists are more likely to be men, though it must be hard for the ladies to be artists, what with spending all their time in the kitchen fixing me sandwiches.)

c) Protagonist comes to terms with his sexuality.

d) Protagonist comes to terms with his art.

At some point in your own life, you’ve tackled points A-C. And if you— yes, you young pre-professional— are reading this article, then you’ve probably spent a great deal of time considering ‘D’ as well. Come to think of it, you probably really mucked up ‘C’ in the process. These familiar world experiences are what make the kunstlerroman such an engaging type of novel. It’s all about that bastard knight of empathy, what Adam Smith defined as “fellow-feeling.” I don't even know you, but I'm sure that growing up sucked for you. So when you read about some kid whose life isn't going so swimmingly, you will exclaim something akin to “Jiminy Cricket! That's very similar to what happened in the 5th grade only with more pantsing and fewer folk medleys!”

But herein also lies the problem¬—it can be deceptively easy to hook a reader with empathy. A hack need only make the trials and tribulations of his protagonist generic enough and everybody can relate. “We’ve read this story before” syndrome may also present itself. I don't know how many more times I can read about some tormented young writer wrestling with his muse where said muse turns out to be “Syphilitic Betty” the town streetwalker. The point is that, while engaging, the kunstlerroman’s stimulation of fellow-feeling in the reader can be both an easy out and a means toward Been-there-done-that-ville.

David Mitchell subverts these potential problems by making his narrative world realistically familiar *and* compellingly unique. You had many problems growing up— braces, coke bottle glasses, hand me down clothes, club foot, etc.—but I bet you didn’t stutter. And even if you did, you never had to deal with Hangman, an entity whose sole purpose in life is to mortify you at the most inappropriate moments by physically stealing away certain letters like ‘d’, ‘n’, or ‘s’. If it took you a week and a half to say “dinosaur,” you’d be miserable too. Hangman is one of several entities (a group rounded out by Maggot and Unborn Twin) that ‘speak’ to the protagonist, Jason Tyler, in his interior monologue. Though, in essence, all of these characters are Jason, they have a diabolically good time playing off of one another and making his life as miserable as possible.

Mitchell also escapes dull generality by setting his character’s uncomfortable growth in a vibrant, rich world of gypsies, Spooks, and undead ice-skaters. I would argue that it is the peculiarities of the narrative, the items which are so oddly unique, that are the most effective at enabling us to empathize with Jason. An excerpt of the latter’s confrontation with a not quite dead schoolmate:

The afternoon’d gone and the sky was turning to outerspace when I noticed another kid on the lake. This boy skated at my speed and followed my orbit, but always stayed on the far side of the lake… My first thought was that he was a kid from the village, just mucking about. I even thought he might be Nick Yew ‘cause he was sort of stocky. But the strange thing was, if I looked at this kid directly for more than a moment, dark spaces sorta swallowed him up. The first couple of times I thought he’d gone home. But after another half loop of the lake, he’d be back.
Go Home, urged the nervy Maggot in me. What if he’s a ghost?
My Unborn Twin can’t stand Maggot. What if he is a ghost?
“Nick?” I called out. My voice sounded indoors. “Nick Yew?”
The kid carried on skating.
I called out, “Ralph Bredon?”
His answer took a whole orbit to reach me.
Butcher’s Boy.

Readers of Mitchell will also find that he has more or less dumped his trademark playful narrative structuring. His previous novel Cloud Atlas reads like a set of Matryoshka nesting dolls, with one story framing another framing another, etc until we are literally 6 or 7 stories deep. The complex structure of Cloud Atlas has its strengths and weaknesses. Invariably you will find one or two of the threads more interesting than others, and it remains somewhat nebulous why this series of stories needs to be told in such an elaborate way. As a whole, though flawed, the work is undoubtedly ambitious. By contrast, the single, meticulously well crafted voice of Black Swan Green seems even more effective at telling such a personal story.

Has this story been told before? Yes. You may have even lived something like it. Is it necessary to tell it again? Absolutely.

**Recommended, but not necessary, pre-reading: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

If you enjoy this title I'd suggest: The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman