… let’s talk about a lake. Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell, is a story where much of the action takes place near the lake, ditches, and culverts of his home town. Black Swan Green‘s viewpoint character is Jason Taylor, a boy who lives in 1981-era Worcestershire in the titular village. He is thirteen and therefore has problems: he is obsessed with his standing at school, and he has a difficult stammer. His father is controlling, his mother is image-obsessed and wants more independence, and his sister dehumanizes him by calling him Thing. Most of the book is about how Jason deals with his life changing over the course of a year. During the year, Jason deals with his family’s escalating internal conflict; high school cliques; his creative mind turning against itself; bullying; and his growing conundrum of blind conformity verses growth as a person, poet, and member of the community.
Black Swan Green is a book in the ‘Slice of Life’ genre. The book deals with the important events in Jason’s life, describing how he lives through these events with little focus on external conflict except on how the events affect his life. Fortunately, Black Swan Green is a good Slice of Life book. Instead of the warm, fluffy chocolate chip cookie that is most Slice of Life, Black Swan Green is stone ground 60% cacao chocolate: gritty and bittersweet, but much better because of it.
The symbolism in Black Swan Green is quite good. Mitchell uses innocence – ice parallels in some of the early chapters. For example, several characters try to warn Jason away from the frozen lake with words that take on double meanings. Another character tries to rattle Jason with a dead, frozen kitten. These scenes contribute to the overarching extended metaphor.
The thematic use of sexuality as a means of power is also present here, as it is in many classic books. However, as a Slice of Life novel, sexuality is used to indicate how grown up a character is. At the beginning of the book, Jason has no idea what sex is beyond a vague notion and a studied avoidance of anything that he thinks might be seen as “gay” by his classmates in order to maintain his position in the school pecking order. Near the end of the book, Jason knows what sex is, acknowledges the fact that he can use words and perform actions that others would deride as gay, and has a heated makeout session with a girl in the back of a discotheque. This coincides rather neatly with him finally defeating his bullies and refusing to take part in school cliques, demonstrating his power.
I rate this book 7/10. I enjoyed this book but would not read it again. I am not fond of the Slice of Life genre, which no doubt colored my opinion of this book.
The Ink Ocean 