Missing the middle path

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Reading David Mitchell’s fourth novel, which is told through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy, reminded me why girls have little or no interest in the contents of boys’ heads until they are well out of their teens. It’s horrible in there. Thirteen-year-old boys, in particular, are revolting concoctions of fear and loathing, of hormones and confusion and clumsy self-assertion.

This presents Mitchell, a writer of enormous talent but uncertain depth, with a problem. The truer and more lifelike he makes his narrator’s voice, the more he risks boring us silly with early teen preoccupations. But the more he uses art (in the form of stylish writing, good plotting, poetic feeling) to overcome this danger, the more he risks hitting false notes and puncturing the story’s painstakingly constructed reality.

Unfortunately, Mitchell doesn’t quite manage to steer the necessary middle path between these twin hazards, and instead careers rather wildly from side to side. Reading Black Swan Green, I was bored, on the one hand, to be spending so much time (credibly) inside its narrator’s head and irritated, on the other, by episodes of such embarrassing artifice that I found myself skimming ahead in search of the words, ‘He woke with a start.’

Jason Taylor is a fairly ordinary 13-year-old growing up in the early 1980s. He is preoccupied with peer group dynamics, gets excited by war (the Falklands conflict breaks out midway through the novel), and is experiencing his first flutters of interest in sex. But he also has a sensitive nature, a gift for language and observation, and a stutter. (People have been calling this book Mitchell’s belated attempt at a ‘first novel’, in the sense that he draws strongly on personal history as first-time novelists tend to do; his earlier novels, by contrast, have been dazzling feats of multi-vocal, time-hopping ventriloquism.