Hello Gentle Reader
(Seeing as it is leap year, and the extra day of February, I thought I'd post a blog on this day to mark the special event.)
Youth and adolescence. Even childhood. Looking back at them, there never really was a place for it, even back then. When one is there, one is quickly trying to flee from it. One is quickly trying to achieve adulthood. In adolescence, there comes those moments, where one dips their toes in the pools of what it means to be in the adult world. Cigarette’s, beer and other assortment of alcohol. First kisses, first orgasm, first ‘other,’ hair. The bodily changes and developments. Its a quintessential time. Though in the end its still a four walled prison. It’s a panopticon of a complex. One is being observed and yet they are not entirely aware that they are being observed. Its like being placed in a petri dish. Being observed and watched. Always being poked and prodded. Changes happened right, left and center. Yet you dare not speak about the awkward ‘developments,’ that are happening to your body. Then comes the even more awkward body talk that some parents have, or that some doctors take it upon themselves. It never has escaped my ears, that when a few young woman or girls had got their first period, they immediately ran to their doctor. Who explained that what had happened was not some mortal wound or some morbidly death like function that was going to kill them and that they were going to survive. It was all natural. Part of one of the many and lovely changes that happens to a young person’s body. Some even go as far, as trying to reference it with a flower. They simply say that they are like a flower getting ready to bloom. If that’s the case, then all those pretty flowers, deserve the reward from being so ugly and from suffering the awkwardness of development itself. The pimples. The greasy face. Everything it was all quite a disgusting site to look at. Yet life just goes on as normal.
Then come the differences in the family structure. If anyone has an older sibling, then the awkward or strange changes, are quite something to observe. That is, it is before you yourself are placed in the petri dish to be observed, like some amoebae. Its quite a site to see. Yet life itself is always quite a site to see.
“Black Swan Green,” by David Mitchell is different then his other novels like “Cloud Atlas,” or even “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.” “Cloud Atlas,” was full of metaphysical action and adventure. It was both otherworldly and worldly. Historical and futuristic. It, itself was the epiphany and the greatest example of a paradox. From the sea faring journal, to the testament and interview of a genetically cloned slave who works in a McDonaldesque fast food restaurant in some Asian country in the near future, to a man who has an accidental spill in a old folks home, to the Hawaiian islands after the end of the world. To a journalist who wishes to stop the plot of nuclear disaster. It’s full of adventure and it is full of the otherworldly place that his characters inhabit.
“The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” itself is a historical fiction, on the isolated place of Japan and its continual isolation, and its reclusive inhabitants, who everything that is not one of them as a outsider, and will never be welcomed into their own depths of their own culture. Its an interesting and metaphysical tale with certain odds and ends of the supernatural that take place within the novel itself. Cannibalism and the act of immortality itself is one of them; that and the fact that monks rape nuns. Its all rather skin crawling sensation.
Yet “Black Swan Green,” is entirely different. It’s pastoresque in many ways. The setting is Worcestershire and the Malvern countryside. It concerns a stammering thirteen-year old boy by the name of Jason Taylor; who like his creator is a man whose first and surname could equally be two first names; and also grew up in Worcestershire and the Malvern countryside. Even more peculiar is the fact that both David Mitchell the author and Jason Taylor both suffering from a stammer. Is it peculiar that I suspect that both David Mitchell and his character Jason Taylor are born in the same month of January? But those are the only noted autobiographical elements that both the character and the creator share with each other. At least from my knowledge. It is interesting that David Mitchell’s fourth book is usually the debut book of many wanna-be authors. Yet on a personal note, it’s nice that David Mitchell, decided to save this little gem for his fourth book. It’s a different taste and a different flavour then “Cloud Atlas.” It certainly shows the authors versatility with style as well as with language and the characters way of speaking.
I think it is rather appropriate to describe David Mitchell as a ventriloquist author. A man who can write in different styles, and different subject matter, with his own obvious writing idiosyncrasies – honestly we still need to know that he is the author; yet he can still pull it off rather well. Sometimes, it can be a bit much. From “Cloud Atlas,” from the section or novella titled:
“Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After,” was well written in its speech but at the same time, it was annoying. Many times I thought to myself, what kind of primitive prime ape talks like this. Kind of makes one wonder, how fast we can resort to our own “natural,” behaviors when everything is gone. When technology is gone, when everything is gone. It’s still an interesting though.
What can be most interesting though, is that David Mitchell’s a accomplished ventriloquist of an author. Pitch perfect at it. Its ironic at times, that he himself has a stammer problem – a speech disorder more or less. Perhaps this speech disorder, allows David Mitchell, to really comprehend the different aspects of speech and how people speak. Speech itself becomes something more of a finger print after a while, or an iris of a person. Unique solely to the person. Because of David Mitchell’s unique speech problem, it may allow him to have a closer understanding to speech, and to words and letters themselves, because he himself would have to feel everyone quickly in his mind before, deciding to use them.
“Black Swan Green,” allows for some interesting prospects into the mind of a thirteen year old, through the thirteen chapters that chronicle a year in his life. Each chapter reads not like an episode but stories that happen in the month of that action. Throughout the year, one learns to see some of the really interesting characters that come and go throughout, the year. There is Julia Jason Taylor’s older sister, who at first is quite a big sister, often referring to her younger brother as the ‘Thing.’ There are his parents, his father a man who in my opinion w hose entire life has fall on broken dreams. He is some corporate goonie for some large grocery chain called “Greenland,” (not the country) and his entire life revoles around that company that demands so much of him. Throughout the years that he himself lived in the village of Black Swan Green, he admits to his son that he has meant to take his children to the Goose Fair, an’ yet work always appeared to have gotten in the way. There is his mother, isn’t she an interesting character. She herself, like most wives has a feeling of competition, with others in ‘suburbia,’ to have a nice garden, and a beautiful kitchen. Then there is Uncle Brian and Aunt Alice and there three kids Alex, Hugo and Nigel. Nigel a smart mathematically inclined child. Hugo an athletic person, who also has a bit of a charming facade on the surface, towers adults, but in the end is just a hedonistic and often strange little one as well. A crooner or casa nova with girls, in his school, and often seen as a cool guy. Then there is Alex, a computer geek – before computer geeks were even in existence.
There come others as well, who appear in the novel. Some of whom are connected to other novels by David Mitchell. Eva van Crommelynck is the daughter of the composer of the sextet of “Cloud Atlas,” as does Gwendolyn Bendincks from “Cloud Atlas,” also makes an appearance. As unfriendly and cruel with a smile and a chatty mouth of teeth.
Yet there are other parts of this novel that are just as interesting as the rest of the work. The entire place of Worcestershire becomes quite a place of interest and wonder. There is a house isolated in the woods, that is inhabited by some senile old witch. A ghost boy who skates on the lake of ice in the winter. Who could forget the wonders of the gypsies’ who have parked themselves in the quarry for a camp, that caused quite the panic. “Greeland,” (not the country) begins to resemble Bluebeard’s chamber. Yet real time or past real time, events take place like the Falkland’s War, but that is a brief mention as well – and does not stir as much in the concept of excitement, but something that just happened in the period that the book is set in.
What David Mitchell writes about though is a grounded novel of youth, coming of age, secrets (Jason Taylor is Eliot Bolivar a poet), family – its a novel of first everything from kisses with a girl, cigarette’s, and standing up for oneself. Its full of wise aphorisms like the nature of boys and their social workings:
“It's all ranks, being a boy, like the army.”
Among many other oddly philosophical musings that a young man could come up with. But it’s a splendid novel. A novel that is reminiscent of everyone’s childhood in some way or another. Whether or not your childhood was urban or rural – there are those moments that everyone first experiences, and they themselves become universal.
David Mitchell once again delivers with another enjoyable novel.
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
*And Remember: Downloading Books Illegally is Thievery and Wrong.*
