Time in Black Swan Green

Black Swan Green isn't a novel that parades its experimentation, the way you could maybe say Portrait does, but that doesn't mean there is none. Mitchell will occasionally throw in really surreal scenes, like the ghost on the lake in "january man," which come out of nowhere to break up an otherwise very realistic, almost mundane story about a normal kid in rural England. The effect is to make those rare moments seem just as ordinary as all the rest of it. All we get is Jason's reaction, and he pretty much takes everything equally. As tied up as he is in his own internal problems, there doesn't seem to be much difference between getting trapped in a house with a weird old magic woman and overhearing his mother talk about a potential affair. The normal adult world is just as confusing to him as any of the strange moments which his own mind (possibly) invents, and so events from both realities read the same way. It feels natural that they're there.

Another piece of seamless experimentation is Jason's occasional shift from past to present tense. Although the novel seems to be narrated by a near-future (maybe 14 years old?) version of Jason, he will occasionally throw in a sentence or paragraph talking about how something makes him feel, in a way that's clearly supposed to give us his reactions as they really happened. This especially happens in moments where Jason is very emotional, almost like remembering how strongly he felt at the time brings him back to it as a narrator. For example, from the latest chapter, "bridle path:" "For breakfast I ate McVitie's Jamaican Ginger Cake and a cocktail of milk, Coke, and Ovaltine. Not bad. Oh, better than not bad! Every single hour of today is a Black Magic chocolate, waiting in its box for me. I retuned the kitchen radio from Radio 4 to Radio 1." But this time shift also in very negative moments, for example when Jason vomits after his first cigarette: "I washed my puke-stained hand in the lake, then wiped away the tears from my puke-teared eyes. I'm so ashamed. Hugo's trying to teach me how to be a kid like him, but I can't even smoke a single cigarette." This one actually goes on much longer in the present tense, ending with "My cousin's sobbing with laughter," which might imply that it's a moment of particularly strong emotion.

Although this shift in tenses was jarring for me at first, by now it feels like a totally natural part of the novel. Not only does it read fine once you get used to it, it also feels like it has a good reason to be there. By mixing up the reactions of "present" Jason with those of "past" Jason, it both emphasizes how strongly felt and long-lasting childhood emotions can be, and makes us question just which version of Jason is narrating the story. Is it actually a present-tense "diary" type story, or is it all being written down at once shortly after the end of the novel, or is it being written by a fully adult Jason, who just makes a big deal out of inhabiting his past? It's too early to tell, which might actually be a good thing; by mixing up the timeline of Jason's progression as a person and a narrator, it makes it feel very true that he remains the same essential person throughout his entire process of development. That's something that doesn't always feel true in coming-of-age novels; sometimes the distance between the narrator and the character, or even the character in the beginning and end, feels so great that "coming-of-age" feels more like a set of checkpoints than a steady growth, which is probably more accurate to how we actually experience it. There's a line from the newest Noah Baumbach movie where one of the (middle-aged) main characters says something like "I finally feel like more than just a child pretending to be an adult," and his wife says "You feel that way too?" David Mitchell seems to really be in tune with the idea that adults are just bigger children, and so far I've been really impressed with the way he subverts my expectations of what it means to "grow" from your past.