Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I listened to the audiobook through OneDigital, an iPhone app with a partnership with the library. The app itself was a little buggy — it would forget where I had left off frequently, so frequently that I began saving bookmarks every single time I knew I was about to stop listening so that I could find my place again; it also needed me to sign in every few launches, so it wasn’t the smoothest of listening experiences.
But the book was fantastic. I enjoyed the personification of Jason’s stammer as Hangman and the travails of being a teenage boy with an older sister in the 80s. I thought he captured that awkward straddling of full teenage-hood and the childhood being left behind, in Jason’s case a little more quickly as his parent’s relationship deteriorates and he deals with the Black Swan Green bullies. As usual, with a David Mitchell book, there are threads in the story that rear their heads and then disappear beneath the surface of the story that hint at a larger, more complex version of reality than meets the eye, but unlike Bone Clocks or Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet they are left buried like the apocryphal children who have fallen through the ice into the pond.
Having heard David Mitchell speak about his own troubles overcoming a stammer on his Bone Clocks tour, I can imagine this is an intensely personal novel for him and while it never reaches the incandescent heights of some of his other books, I really enjoyed spending a year with Jason Taylor.