. Spinning .

This is one book that I can describe as having grown on me.  I was not overwhelmed with it after the first couple of chapters and its subtle advance of plot and character snuck up as Jason, over the course of a year, learns and matures to develop as a person.

David Mitchell’s use of language is not particularly doused in imagery, but then, this is a first person pov of a thirteen year-old boy.  We learn that he is a poet however, and while Mitchell does not overplay this aspect, Jason’s use of language in describing his episodes is a gradual increase of control over his world and we see it in his change of word use. 

There are themes of change and themes of struggle, in Jason’s overcoming his stutter, in his facing the further demons of the bullies among his peers, in his understanding of the disintegration of his parents’ marriage, in his learning the complications of friendships and family.  It is far too easy for an author to abuse the first person pov by allowing his narrator to explain his feelings to the reader.  Mitchell is above that.  We see the changes in Jason’s thoughts without his having to tell us how he feels.  He surprises us in the same way he surprises himself.  It is a brilliant method of indepth characterization that is a pleasure to read.

And, Mitchell does come through with some amazing phrasing as the story grows.  I’ll leave off with this example, as Jason’s family is separating, leaving their home and moving on:

The echoey house asked its four corners but no answer rebounded back.
Our right to be here is weaker by the minute.  (p. 192)

First of all, this following episode reminds me a bit of Steve Ersinghaus’ piece, Stoning Field, in the interaction of boys and the underlying theme of war:

Here was a bent glade I knew from when us village kids used to fight war games in the woods.  Pretty seriously we took it, with prisoners of war, cease-fires, flags one side had to steal (footy socks on a stick), and rules of combat that were half tag, half judo.  More sophisticated than those Passchendaeles back on the Malvern road, anyhow.  When field marshals picked their men I was snapped up ’cause I was an ace dodger and tree climber.  Those war games were ace.  Sport at school isn’t the same.  Sport doesn’t let you be someone you’re not.  War games’re extinct now.  Us lot were the last ones.  (p. 235)

Jason has escaped through the woods after nearly walking right into a pelting war of bullies out on the road.  He is one of those who has been picked on and bullied and in this learning of dealing with others, he is brought into another war raging in his village: against the village council who would build permanent gypsy housing right outside of his village.  Most are naturally against the move, with the usual fear and lies that come with outsiders moving into one’s home territory. 

I do like this gradual change coming about in Jason, watching him face up to and overcome or learn to handle the way the world works.

I would almost say that the underlying theme in this novel is struggle and change.  Jason, through the space of a few months (summer and now into the school year) faces some challenge in each of the chapters and we cheer him on as he overcomes and grows.  But there are several threads of struggle that wind through each chapter from the very beginning. 

One is, of course, his personal struggle to master his speech and eliminate or at least sidestop the stutter that affects his confidence and his interactions with others.  The other is the situation with the relationship between his father and mother.  The story opens with a mysterious phone call wherein the caller hangs up without speaking.  We suspect a mistress. What Mitchell shows us are no direct confrontations. He shows us the mother speaking with her sister about some suspicions.  He shows us the mother and father arguing about money being spent.  We see Jason accompany his father on a business trip and get a clearer picture of the man and his shortcomings as well as his fears.  We see Jason with his mother, now an entrepreneur, and how she has managed to cope with the situation in her marriage by becoming successful.

And through it all, we see Jason’s growing understanding of others as he himself is in a constant battle with bullies.

One thing that Mitchell seems to be quite good at doing is bringing in bits of Jason’s thoughts that the reader can well relate to from past experience:

Teachers’re always using that "in your own words."  I hate that.  Authors knit their sentences tight.  It’s their job.  Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily?  How’re you s’posed to say Kapellmeister if you can’t say Kapellmeister?  (p. 210)

These is an underlying poignancy about Jason and how he deals with popularity among his peers, his interest in girls, and his concern about his parents’ fighting.  These are all things that many of us have experienced in one way or another. There is that one big problem of his stuttering that runs throughout the novel tying them all together. The speech impediment may indeed be a metaphor for adolescence.

There is a relationship here between the chapters that Mitchell uses as stages both in the maturing of his character and the setting within which the character is placed to face a challenge. 

From a childish worry of being accepted by his peers to the relationship with an old woman who appreciates his poetry, Jason has grown in his understanding of the world and his place within it.  He has learned to deal with various scenarios that call for choices to be made and demons to be faced and with each trial we see him establishing a more adult outlook.

From Chapter 1 we recognized a problem of sorts in the marriage of his father and mother.  We see a strained relationship between Jason and his dad, one that is both loving yet distanced by the father’s preoccupation with his job, and possible, with a mistress.  When Jason goes on an overnight business trip with his father there is opportunity for both insight and a change in their relationship.  Mitchell handles this beautifully varying between disappointment and those few moments of sharing that glue them together.

A little gem:

(Talking with some people’s like moving up higher screens in a computer game.) (p. 158)

I believe Jason’s referring to his growing relationship with Madame Crommelynck, but since he has just described his parents’ current state to her, it may as well be a reference to theirs.  What’s so neat though is the comparison Mitchell has Jason using, of the nature of man and his means of communicating to the technology of computer gaming which is, after all, a simile of reality.

I love this, it’s as representative of the thought process of children, in carrying an idea a step further and further until it becomes another question of sorts, while at the same time, it is a worldly view and comment on life and death, and a perspective of time and space:

The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and future.  The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I’ll die in.  (Has it been built yet?)  Cars’re rooms.  So are woods.  Skies’re ceilings.  Distances’re walls.  Wombs’re rooms made of mothers.  Graves’re rooms made of soil.  (p. 151)

There is a logical progression of states from life to death, the hospital ward through life’s ‘places’ all the way to a place to die.  I love the way Mitchell makes the circuit and brings the end (death) into the future by asking if the room has been built yet. 

I like the expansion of space bounded by walls into arenas of open space.  The idea of distance being a wall is thought provoking and changes the whole meaning of traveling or escape by leaving.  The best: "wombs’re rooms made of mothers." which goes back to birth and ends with "graves’re rooms made of soil" that encompasses the span of a life.

Nice stuff.

A couple of real nice exposures of change of attitude and time by Mitchell, keeping the descriptions fairly close yet far enough apart to denote a difference in Jason’s first and second visits to Madame Crommelynck:

Inside smelt of liver and soil.  A velvet staircase sliced sunlight across the hall.  A blue guitar rested on a sort of Turkish chair.  A bare lady in a punt drifted on a lake of water lilies in a gold frame.  The "solarium" sounded ace. (p. 143)

Jason and the Madame discuss poetry and the term beauty.  She is demanding of one thing from him, that he speak what’s on his mind and say it honestly.  On his second visit, this is his description of her home:

The stairway needed fixing.  A knacked blue guitar’d been left on a broken stool.  In a gaudy from a shivery woman sprawled in a punt on a clogged pond.  Once again, the butler led me to the solarium.  (I looked "solarium" up.  It just means "an airy room." (p. 151)

The mystery of the visit, the anticipation, has been taken away after the first meeting has established the woman’s interest in his poems.  Oddly, he does away with his lyrical description and replaces it with a more honest view, doing just as the woman had suggested as far as overdoing the elaborate use of adjectives for imagery.

And here’s another goodie:

I’d got ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ by Ernest Hemingway from the school library, just ’cause Madame Crommelynck’d mentioned him.  (The introduction said the book’d made Americans burst into tears when it was read on the radio.  But it’s just about an old guy catching a monster sardine.  If Americans cry at tht, they’ll cry at anything.) (p. 151)

We’re seeing an immediate influence on Jason, a change coming about as he is recognized as a poet–something no one else knows since he uses a pseudonym and the poetry is being published locally by the vicarage.  But the old woman has been reading the poems and forwarding them on, and has evidently seen something in Jason worth nurturing.

There is an underlying theme to this novel, and that is the war in the Falklands that has affected England and comes home to Jason with the death in combat of the older brother of a friend. The ongoing war is also an indicator of Jason’s maturing as his interests change from boyhood play to girls, and war, and death, and sex, and his enlarging the world around him by studying it more closely.

Mitchell seems to challenge his protagonist in ways that teach him about people. Each chapter is linear in time, but each brings in an episode that differs from the others in installing a new hurdle of sorts for him to overcome or digest and evaluate.  The episodes tie in in subtle ways; Jason’s view of a young couple having sex under a tree in which he’s hiding gives him an indication of male/female relationships.  This, against the growing discontent between his father and mother–likely over a suspected affair that has been foreshadowed beautifully in the opening of the story–has him questioning the changes between young love and years of marriage. 

In the chapter I’ve just finished, Jason is taking a long walk through the outskirts of town to investigate a mysterious underground tunnel.  For me, it serves as a metaphor for this particular stage in his life between adolescence and manhood.  What he encounters along the way are surely representative of life’s own curves and walls to climb around or over.

A few nice phrases used to establish an unspoken fact.  Here, the common knowledge of Moran’s father being an alcoholic, yet the way it is handled carefully by others:

"Does your old man ever get pissed? Moran asked.
If I said yes I’d be lying, but if I said no it’d look day.  "He has a drink or two, when my Uncle Brian visits."
"Not a drink or two.  I mean does he get so fucking plastered he. . . he can hardly speak?"
"No."
That ‘no’ turned the three feet between us into three miles.  (p. 80)

And here, where Jason is taken by Dawn Madden as the first girl he’s interested in, and the subtle manner (yet bold, since it is merely a repetition) that Mitchell shows it.

"Madden!"
Her stare said, What?  Dawn Madden’s eyes are dark honey.
"That could’ve stuck right into me!"
Dawn Madden’s eyes are dark honey.  "Oh, poor Taylor."  (p. 84)

Mitchell appears to use the chapters as episodes, focusing on an incident unrelated to the previous but consistent with a linear timeline as each refers to something happening in the prior chapter.  It seems that Jason faces a new problem (skating, stuttering, smoking) in each, and comes out of each a bit changed, a bit more mature perhaps. 

Mitchell also takes advantage of the interaction of the characters, although he threw out a round of Jason’s classmates with full names that served to put me on notice to pay attention and remember them.  Certain characters are obviously more meaningful and are skillfully reinforced by the author.

Just as each of these are stages of growth, each can clearly stand on its own as a short story I suspect.  I’m liking it better, though I realize that I’m drawn into novels that emphasize lyrical language and makes abundant use of metaphor and simile as descriptive devices of not just visual display, but of deepening the characters.

There are mixed feelings about this book; after finishing the first chapter I see much I like yet there’s an ambivalence and I question the rave reviews I seem to recall when it came out.

First of all, I must mention the "exploratory" side of Mitchell’s writing.  Since punctuation has already been played with by Faulkner, McCarthy, and others, Mitchell instead has focused on passing off the dialect of his narrator, a thirteen year-old boy, as realistic via contractions:

I wouldn’t've argued

But the dark’d shuffled itself and the sour aunt’d gone.

That’s fine; I do like realistic language but just as with accents, the reader imagines them without having to have them spelt (sic) out.  Some of these, such as "dark’d" (meaning dark had) are a halt in the flow of reading in opposition to their intention of smoothing out by melding together a group of common words.  I do it all the time in emails and blog postings, but to the extent of a novel it will either be overcome or become downright annoying.

On the good side, there is a hint of magical realism as  Jason, skating on the pond after his friends have departed, sees the figure of another skater who may be a ghost.  He is injured in a fall and goes to a house where a strange old woman, the "sour aunt" lives (maybe) with her brother.  There is an almost fairytale encounter as she fixes his ankle and gives him something to drink that puts him to sleep.  This is a very interesting intrusion of the make-believe in the midst of a very down-to-earth narrative point of view. 

Not gripping, but certainly intriguing.

Mitchell draws the characters well, and in the reflections of the protagonist (Jason–we know this because his mother has addressed him at some point) we do get some nice stuff:

Nobody’d be out on the frozen lake, I’d suspected, and there wasn’t a soul.  Superman II was on TV. (…) Clark Kent gives up his powes just to have sexual intercourse with Lois Lane in a glittery bed.  Who’d make such a stupid swap?  If you could fly?  (p. 17)

So the voice puts the character at a certain stage in his adolescence. It also gives us some of that wonderful child’s eye way of looking at things, which often includes simile, but this one just doesn’t work for me:

Overhanging trees tried to touch my head with their fingers.  Rooks craw…craw…crawed, like old people who’ve forgotten why they’ve come upstairs. 
A sort of trance.  (p. 17)

There’s beauty in the branches as fingers, but trees don’t normally overhang; branches do. It sounds like Mitchell got the image and then didn’t quite know how to put it into words.

The "rooks craw..craw…crawed"–well that works well, giving us the onomatopoeia of the sound.  But coupled with the simile "like old people who’ve forgotten why they’ve come upstairs" doesn’t connect for me.  I love the simile, but I don’t see how the rooks crawing are similar in any way.  Again, it seems that Mitchell tries to cover his ass by adding "A sort of trance."  This almost but doesn’t fit the previous action and mood.

Or maybe I’m just too picky after coming down from William Gay.

Mitchell appears to get the voice of a twelve year-old going on thirteen down pretty well as he interacts with his family and friends.  The setting is in England but the family life and the boyhood games of the 1980’s is comfortably relayed.

The only thing that has bothered me so far is the amount of names that are thrown out in the first few pages, each character being given quite a bit of space so that it’s hard to pick out who’s important to follow and remember or, if all of them, to remember who and what they are.

I don’t expect the writing to be of the eloquence that I’ve just experienced from William Gay, and it would be out of place here, mainly because of the protagonist being who he is.  I’m finding myself putting the novel down more frequently, but I’m going to try to put some straight time into it tomorrow.

William Gay is a hard act to follow and I felt that sense of disappointment as I went through my shelves to select my next reading.  I’m in the mood for language, yet what besides a few that I’m saving away for special times can rise up to meet the anticipation?

So it was best, I think, to choose something I have no preconceptions about; a new author, a different setting, a different time.

After pulling out a few novels, glancing at a few pages, and ending up sticking back in place, I seemed drawn to David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green.  Different enough to not compare with Gay (or Faulkner, McCarthy, Marquez, Steinbeck).

The first thing I’ve noticed just by thumb-flipping through–lots and lots of dialogue.  Odd how it stood out and then I remembered how Gay–like McCarthy–gives us a break from punctuation.

First few pages are interesting, from a first person pov of a young boy sneaking into his father’s office to answer the prolonged ringing of a phone and getting no response from the caller.  That’s your standard hook; let’s see where it goes from there.  A mistress?  Mafia?  As I said: interesting.