Black Swan Green: A Novel - Hardcover

Mitchell, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400063795 ISBN 13: 9781400063796

Publisher: Random House, 2006

Synopsis

From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new.
Black Swan tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen lake; of “nightcreeping” through the summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled thrills of the Falklands War and its human toll; of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend, Ross Wilcox; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian emigré who is both more and less than she appears; of Jason’s search to replace his dead grandfather’s irreplaceable smashed watch before the crime is discovered; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first Duran Duran Lps, and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher’s recession; of Gypsies camping in the woods and the hysteria they inspire; and, even closer to home, of a slow-motion divorce in four seasons.
Pointed, funny, profound, left-field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell’s subtlest and most effective achievement to date.

About this title

About the Author:

David Mitchell is the acclaimed author of the novels Cloud Atlas, which was a Man Booker Prize finalist; Number9Dream, which was short-listed for the Man Booker as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Ghostwritten, awarded the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best book by a writer under thirty-five and short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. In 2003, David Mitchell was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta. He now lives in Ireland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

JANUARY MAN

Do not set foot in my office. That’s Dad’s rule. But the phone’d rung twenty-five
times. Normal people give up after ten or eleven, unless it’s a matter of
life or death. Don’t they? Dad’s got an answering machine like James Garner’s
in The Rockford Files with big reels of tape. But he’s stopped leaving it
switched on recently. Thirty rings, the phone got to. Julia couldn’t hear it up
in her converted attic ’cause “Don’t You Want Me?” by Human League was
thumping out dead loud. Forty rings. Mum couldn’t hear ’cause the washing
machine was on berserk cycle and she was hoovering the living room. Fifty
rings. That’s just not normal. S’pose Dad’d been mangled by a juggernaut on
the M5 and the police only had this office number ’cause all his other I.D.’d
got incinerated? We could lose our final chance to see our charred father in
the terminal ward.
So I went in, thinking of a bride going into Bluebeard’s chamber after
being told not to. (Bluebeard, mind, was waiting for that to happen.) Dad’s office
smells of pound notes, papery but metallic too. The blinds were down so
it felt like evening, not ten in the morning. There’s a serious clock on the
wall, exactly the same make as the serious clocks on the walls at school.
There’s a photo of Dad shaking hands with Craig Salt when Dad got made regional
sales director for Greenland. (Greenland the supermarket chain, not
Greenland the country.) Dad’s IBM computer sits on the steel desk. Thousands
of pounds, IBMs cost. The office phone’s red like a nuclear hotline and
it’s got buttons you push, not the dial you get on normal phones.
So anyway, I took a deep breath, picked up the receiver, and said our
number. I can say that without stammering, at least. Usually.
But the person on the other end didn’t answer.
"Hello?” I said. “Hello?”
They breathed in like they’d cut themselves on paper.
“Can you hear me? I can’t hear you.”
Very faint, I recognized the Sesame Street music.
“If you can hear me”—I remembered a Children’s Film Foundation film
where this happened—“tap the phone, once.”
There was no tap, just more Sesame Street.
“You might have the wrong number,” I said, wondering.
A baby began wailing and the receiver was slammed down.
When people listen they make a listening noise.
I’d heard it, so they’d heard me.

“May as well be hanged for a sheep as hanged for a handkerchief.” Miss
Throckmorton taught us that aeons ago. ’Cause I’d sort of had a reason to
have come into the forbidden chamber, I peered through Dad’s razor-sharp
blind, over the glebe, past the cockerel tree, over more fields, up to the
Malvern Hills. Pale morning, icy sky, frosted crusts on the hills, but no sign of
sticking snow, worse luck. Dad’s swivelly chair’s a lot like the Millennium
Falcon’s laser tower. I blasted away at the skyful of Russian MiGs streaming
over the Malverns. Soon tens of thousands of people between here and
Cardiff owed me their lives. The glebe was littered with mangled fusilages
and blackened wings. I’d shoot the Soviet airmen with tranquilizer darts as
they pressed their ejector seats. Our marines’ll mop them up. I’d refuse all
medals. “Thanks, but no thanks,” I’d tell Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
when Mum invited them in, “I was just doing my job.”
Dad’s got this fab pencil sharpener clamped to his desk. It makes pencils
sharp enough to puncture body armor. H pencils’re sharpest, they’re Dad’s
faves. I prefer 2Bs.
The doorbell went. I put the blind back to how it was, checked I’d left no
other traces of my incursion, slipped out, and flew downstairs to see who it
was. The last six steps I took in one death-defying bound.
Moron, grinny-zitty as ever. His bumfluff’s getting thicker, mind. “You’ll
never guess what!”
"What?”
“You know the lake in the woods?”
“What about it?”
“It’s only”—Moron checked that we weren’t being overheard—“gone and
froze solid! Half the kids in the village’re there, right now. Ace doss or what?”
“Jason!” Mum appeared from the kitchen. “You’re letting the cold in!
Either invite Dean inside—hello Dean—or shut the door.”
“Um . . . just going out for a bit, Mum.”
“Um . . . where?”
“Just for some healthy fresh air.”
That was a strategic mistake. “What are you up to?”
I wanted to say “Nothing” but Hangman decided not to let me. “Why
would I be up to anything?” I avoided her stare as I put on my navy duffel
coat.
“What’s your new black parka done to offend you, may I ask?”
I still couldn’t say “Nothing.” (Truth is, black means you fancy yourself as
a hard-knock. Adults can’t be expected to understand.) “My duffel’s a bit
warmer, that’s all. It’s parky out.”
“Lunch is one o’clock sharp.” Mum went back to changing the Hoover
bag. “Dad’s coming home to eat. Put on a woolly hat or your head’ll freeze.”
Woolly hats’re gay but I could stuff it in my pocket later.
“Good-bye then, Mrs. Taylor,” said Moron.
“Good-bye, Dean,” said Mum.
Mum’s never liked Moron.

Moron’s my height and he’s okay but Jesus he pongs of gravy. Moron wears
ankle-flappers from charity shops and lives down Druggers End in a brick cottage
that pongs of gravy too. His real name’s Dean Moran (rhymes with “warren”)
but our P.E. teacher Mr. Carver started calling him “Moron” in our first
week and it’s stuck. I call him “Dean” if we’re on our own but name’s aren’t
just names. Kids who’re really popular get called by their first names, so Nick
Yew’s always just “Nick.” Kids who’re a bit popular like Gilbert Swinyard have
sort of respectful nicknames like “Yardy.” Next down are kids like me who call
each other by our surnames. Below us are kids with piss-take nicknames like
Moran Moron or Nicholas Briar, who’s Knickerless Bra. It’s all ranks, being a
boy, like the army. If I called Gilbert Swinyard just “Swinyard,” he’d kick my
face in. Or if I called Moron “Dean” in front of everyone, it’d damage my
own standing. So you’ve got to watch out.
Girls don’t do this so much, ’cept for Dawn Madden, who’s a boy gone
wrong in some experiment. Girls don’t scrap so much as boys either. (That said,
just before school broke up for Christmas, Dawn Madden and Andrea Bozard
started yelling “Bitch!” and “Slag!” in the bus queues after school. Punching
tits and pulling hair and everything, they were.) Wish I’d been born a girl,
sometimes. They’re generally loads more civilized. But if I ever admitted that
out loud I’d get bumhole plummer scrawled on my locker. That happened to
Floyd Chaceley for admitting he liked Johann Sebastian Bach. Mind you, if
they knew Eliot Bolivar, who gets poems published in Black Swan Green Parish
Magazine, was me, they’d gouge me to death behind the tennis courts with
blunt woodwork tools and spray the Sex Pistols logo on my gravestone.
So anyway, as Moron and I walked to the lake he told me about the
Scalectrix he’d got for Christmas. On Boxing Day its transformer blew up and
nearly wiped out his entire family. “Yeah, sure,” I said. But Moron swore it on
his nan’s grave. So I told him he should write to That’s Life on BBC and get
Esther Rantzen to make the manufacturer pay compensation. Moron
thought that might be difficult ’cause his dad’d bought it off a Brummie at
Tewkesbury Market on Christmas Eve. I didn’t dare ask what a “Brummie”
was in case it’s the same as “bummer” or “bumboy,” which means homo.
“Yeah,” I said, “see what you mean.” Moron asked me what I’d got for Christmas.
I’d actually got £13.50 in book tokens and a poster of Middle-earth, but
books’re gay so I talked about the Game of Life, which I’d got from Uncle
Brian and Aunt Alice. It’s a board game you win by getting your little car to
the end of the road of life first, and with the most money. We crossed the
crossroads by the Black Swan and went into the woods. Wished I’d rubbed
ointment into my lips ’cause they get chapped when it’s this cold.
Soon we heard kids through the trees, shouting and screaming. “Last one
to the lake’s a spaz!” yelled Moron, haring off before I was ready. Straight off
he tripped over a frozen tire rut, went flying, and landed on his arse. Trust
Moran. “I think I might’ve got a concussion,” he said.
“Concussion’s if you hit your head. Unless your brain’s up your arse.”
What a line. Pity nobody who matters was around to hear it.

The lake in the woods was epic. Tiny bubbles were trapped in the ice like in
Fox’s Glacier Mints. Neal Brose had proper Olympic ice skates he hired out
for 5p a go, though P...

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1400063795
• ISBN 13: 9781400063796
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304