Black Swan Green
UK First edition cover
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| Author | David Mitchell |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Semi-autobiographical, Bildungsroman novel |
| Publisher | Random House |
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Publication date
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April 2006 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 294 pp (first edition, paperback) |
| ISBN | (first edition, paperback) |
| OCLC | 61513194 |
| 823/.92 22 | |
| LC Class | PR6063.I785 B58 2006 |
Black Swan Green is a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman written by David Mitchell. It was published in April 2006 in the U.S. and May 2006 in the UK. The novel's thirteen chapters each represent one month—from January 1982 through January 1983—in the life of 13-year-old Worcestershire boy Jason Taylor. The novel is written from the perspective of Taylor and employs many teen colloquialisms and popular-culture references from early-1980s England.
Mitchell has the speech disorder of stammering, "I’d probably still be avoiding the subject today had I not outed myself by writing a semi-autobiographical novel, Black Swan Green, narrated by a stammering 13 year old."
Black Swan Green is currently being adapted for Ruby Films and Channel 4 by Tony Marchant.
Jason Taylor is a 13-year-old with a stammer in the small village of Black Swan Green in Worcestershire. The first chapter starts with a rule Jason's father has: "Do not set foot in my office" and Jason breaking that rule to pick up the phone. It also introduces Jason's older sister Julia, friend Dean "Moron" Moran, popular boy Nick Yew, Gilbert "Yardy" Swinyard, Ross Wilcox and his cousin Gary Drake, golden boy student Neal Brose, tomboy Dawn Madden, Mervyn "Squelch" Hill, bully Grant Burch, local legend Tom Yew and "less shiny legend" Pluto Noak. Jason secretly publishes his poems in the Black Swan Green Parish magazine under the alias "Eliot Bolivar". Jason breaks his grandfather's Omega Seamaster De Ville, a valuable watch. Also, after an accident on an iced-over lake, he meets a mysterious old woman rumoured to be a witch.
Jason goes into more detail about his struggles with stammering. He refers to this mental block as "hangman". He's scared to stand up and speak during the school's weekly rhetoric session, but is saved by a call from his South African speech therapist, Mrs. De Roos.
Introduces Jason's relatives who come for a visit, including cool, 15-year-old cousin Hugo Lamb (who reappears in Mitchell's later novel The Bone Clocks), who convinces Jason to try his first cigarette.
A fight between Burch and Wilcox ends with the former breaking his right wrist. Jason encounters Madden, a girl he has a crush on. She treats him like a dog. Escaping up a tree, Jason witnesses Tom Yew, on leave from the Navy, make love to Debby Crombie.
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