A Review Of Black Swan Green: Kids Are Bastards

One of the better books I’ve read in recent years is Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. It was my first Mitchell novel and I was extremely taken by its structure, six tangentially related stories that followed one upon the other. I highly recommend it.

But I’m here to review one of his other novels that I’ve just completed, Black Swan Green. I don’t know much about Mitchell, but I did recently listen to a Fresh Air interview in which he spoke about growing up with a stutter. Seeing as how the main character of Black Swan Green is a thirteen-year-old with a stutter, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this novel is at least partially biographical.

More than just the stutter, this novel is about what it’s like being bullied as a teenager. Jason tries to navigate his way into the popular crowd at school, but never manages to get past the periphery. It gets to the point that he’s scared to go to school, he’s scared to face his parents, he’s scared to talk to anyone. He’s pretty much scared the entire novel. Even during his brief moments of happiness, it’s always apparent that he’s one stutter or misstep away from being humiliated.

Bullying is a subject that seems to be in the news a lot in the past decade, what with the Columbine murders and countless examples of persecuted teens taking their own lives. Black Swan Green gives a very bleak picture of what it’s like to be bullied, and anyone who’s ever been on either side of the bullying equation will recognize themselves in the novel. Basically, the story reminds us that kids are bastards. And so are adults.

Black Swan Green is not as satisfying as Cloud Atlas. It’s a more personal story told on a much smaller scale. It feels more open-ended. There is a conclusion, but there’s no true resolution for most of the characters. We experience one extremely difficult school year in Jason’s adolescent life. I think it will be hard for a reader not to be moved by his experience but that doesn’t make it a great novel.

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