The British Catcher in the Rye?

Black Swan Green

David Mitchell

Started July 13, 2007

Finished July 20. 2007

Well, I suppose I should preface this by saying that I LOVED Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, but I can definitely see where it's not for everyone. Part of what I loved about it is the way that Mitchell uses structure to add to the story, and he pays attention to structure in Black Swan Green as well. It's more reader friendly in Black Swan Green though. Cloud Atlas cuts each of the stories except for the last one in half and wraps them around each other, like Russian dolls. In Black Swan Green, both the passage of time and the number 13 are important, and so there are 13 chapters, one for each month that the book spans. You get an episode that happens each month rather than a completely continuous narrative. It works for me.

Black Swan Green is significantly more accessible than Cloud Atlas, although 80s British slang is sometimes like a different language. It's kind of like A Clockwork Orange though... you get used to it. And then you start wanting to whip out words from it and no one knows what the hell you're trying to say... unless they've read the book.

The narrator, Jason Taylor, is sometimes incredibly acute, but then also sometimes things go way over his head. It's also quite interesting to try to work out Jason's contradictions throughout the novel. For example, my favorite quote from the novel: "Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right" (118). The following chapter makes this a very interesting statement indeed. By the end of the novel, though, Jason has moved forward.