About a Boy

Author David Mitchell. Photo Miriam Berkley/Random House Canada.

British author David Mitchell writes the literary equivalent of Rube Goldberg machines — twisty-turny plots, chapters that end mid-sentence, sudden lurches in time, corkscrewing dialogue, off-centre jokes and a voice that borrows from sources as diverse as Philip K. Dick and Daniel Defoe. His writing is, in large part, an extension of his childhood games. “You can see the adult vocation in the patterns of kids’ play,” he says over the phone from a hotel in San Francisco, where he’s on a press tour. “I was one of those model children who could spend an entire rainy weekend building cardboard spaceships and mapping out imaginary lands on huge pieces of paper.” Each of his books has what he calls “a secret architecture” and blueprint. This, for instance, is how he pitched his editor on his last novel, 2003’s Booker-nominated Cloud Atlas: “Try to imagine a set of Russian dolls, and the narrative is at the tip of a drill bit that is being driven though the doll’s navels and then out again through their spines.”

Fans of Mitchell’s narrative riddles are in for a surprise with his latest novel, Black Swan Green. On the surface it is his most conventional book — an autobiographical coming-of-age story set in 1982 in the poky English village of Black Swan Green (there’s a classic Mitchell joke in the fact that there are no swans to be found in the hamlet). But it’s also the most emotionally satisfying. The whiz-bang post-modern dazzle of Cloud Atlas, Ghostwritten (1999) and number9dream (2001, another Booker nominee) was brilliant, but at times empty. Liberated by a simple, but rigid, structure — each of the 13 chapters covers a month in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor — Mitchell infuses Black Swan Green with melancholy, horror, lyricism and wonder.

Writing in an adolescent voice was “most fun and most difficult,” says Mitchell, whose usually exhaustive research period was, for this book, “a relative holiday of calling up old friends and lurking on those school reunion websites, where you realize exactly why you haven’t seen those people for 20 years.” In writing Jason, Mitchell says, “it was easy to get the slang and diction right, but harder to get the emotion and insight. I didn’t want him to be an overly bright, Holden Caulfield type. Instead, I looked for accidental poetry and accidental wisdom.” And Jason’s observations are at once sublimely profound and hilariously schoolboyish: “Over the English Channel the sticky afternoon was as turquoise as Head and Shoulders shampoo.”

Courtesy Random House Canada.

Jason is, naturally, a misfit. An aspiring poet (he pens verse for the parish newsletter under the pretentious pseudonym Eliot Bolivar) and a middle-class kid in a classroom of working-class toughies, Jason is also plagued by a stammer — a condition that Mitchell shares. “The stammer is all from me,” he says. “I was, and am, a stammerer. It’s something that I’m interested in, but that no one ever writes about and no one ever talks about. No one ever asks a stammerer about it, for the very good reason of not wanting to hurt your feelings.” For Jason, who gives names like “Maggot” and “Unborn Twin” to his private urges and inner voices, his stammer is personified as “Hangman,” an unpredictable adversary who makes nightmares out of words that begin with the letters “N” or “S.” As Jason explains, “when a stammerer stammers their eyeballs pop out, they go trembly-red like an evenly matched arm wrestler and their mouth guppergupperguppers like a fish in a net…. [Hangman’s] snaky fingers sink inside my tongue and squeeze my windpipe so nothing’ll work…. Twenty million words begin with N or S. Apart from the Russians starting a nuclear war, my biggest fear is if Hangman gets interested in J-words, ’cause then I won’t even be able to say my own name.”

At home there’s not much sympathy. Jason’s father is a smug workaholic with a secret mistress, his lonely mother channels her considerable creativity into keeping-up-with-the-Joneses home improvement and his popular, smart-alecky older sister is distracted by boyfriends and university plans. Among his peers, Jason is mostly interested in flying beneath the radar, doing his best to avoid after-school beatings and the humiliations of gym class. “It’s all ranks, being a boy,” Jason notes, “like the army.”

Reading the book from an adult distance, the teenage hierarchy is shockingly cruel — being spotted with his mother at a movie theatre exiles Jason to social Siberia — but he takes it for granted and even, eventually, finds the courage to face down his tormentors. “Cruelty,” Mitchell says, “is inherent in human psychology, but as adults we can channel naked aggression into something more acceptable, like Machiavellian ambition. We become more civilized. We have elections, meetings, bylaws and compromises. But those impulses aren’t as deep as we’d like them to be. Group dynamics never stop. They just become more refined.”

Yet, for all the terrors of his world, Jason also manages to collect a menagerie of colourful benefactors: a gypsy knife sharpener who he stumbles across in the woods; an old woman straight out of a Grimm fairy tale who applies a miraculous poultice to a twisted ankle; and an aging Belgian bohemian who lectures him on art. Attentive readers will recognize the latter: Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck from Cloud Atlas. It’s a recurring motif of Mitchell’s to populate subsequent books with characters from previous ones. (The especially eagle-eyed will pick out Neil Brose, one of Jason’s classmates, who appears as an adult stockbroker in Ghostwritten.) Is this a diversion to entertain himself during the lonely hours of writing, or is there a deep meaning to be gleaned? 

“On one level, it’s just enormous fun. But as well, bringing in what I like to call one of my ‘pre-used’ characters adds a deeper sense of reality to the current work. Those characters come with their own back-story and history and sense of place. I think that pre-existence makes the latest story seem more real, gives it a sense of history and connectedness. I sort of think of it like my past characters are all waiting around a labour office somewhere looking for another job. Or it’s like one of those restaurants in Los Angeles where all the waiters are actors. When I’m writing something new, I audition some of the old characters for some of the minor roles.”

But the most fun he had writing this book, Mitchell admits, was getting to relive the music of his early adolescence. When Jason goes to a village disco, the DJ plays Friggin’ in the Riggin’ by the Sex Pistols, House of Fun by Madness and Come on Eileen by Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Still, Mitchell groans when he mentions some of the 1980s worst offenders. “Take any era and only five per cent of its pop music is art, but the early 1980s gets particularly bad press. Maybe it was the hair. And maybe it’s because some of the kitschiest stuff is the stuff that endures, like Duran Duran and Human League.”

Of his own favourites, Mitchell gives a nod to Pink Floyd (“Of course”) and Yes (“I’m afraid so”), but the band he gave his full adolescent allegiance to was Rush. “I only say this to you because you are Canadian, but the band was the first inkling I had that Canada might be a cool place. Rush spoke to bookish kids like myself. The music involved a whole lot of human organs — not just the testicles, but the mind, too. There were literary references to Kubla Khan and Cervantes. It was brilliant. I’m happy to cite Neil Peart as an early influence.”

Black Swan Green is published by Knopf Canada and is in stores now.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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