Final Thoughts on Black Swan Green

Black Swan Green Part 3
After completing the novel, I felt relieved to finally finish with the last page. Black Swan Green disappointed me. Jason is frustrated with the ephemeral nature of life as a thirteen year old boy. I too am frustrated as a reader with how transient and disjointed this novel is. The twelve chapters represent a month in Jason’s life but they fail to amount to a cohesive whole. After the first half, the novel becomes repetitive, fragmented and anticlimactic. I asked what the larger significance of this uneventful novel is. There are no resolutions because the novel lacks conflict. Many teenagers experience dreary childhoods similar to Jason. I wish Mitchell had focused on Jason’s poetry. Jason’s poetry abruptly stops once Madame Croomelynck disappears. The chapters can function as topics of conversation on real world issues. For example, students can explore racism/xenophobia, Gypsy’s and immigration in the chapter “knife grinder”. But there are better texts that explore and tackle issues, such as divorce, gentrification and war, in much greater depth. Mitchell has said in an interview that "Ideas are well and good, but without characters to hang them on, fiction falls limp." I agree that Jason is certainly an intriguing character but Mitchell’s novel lacks content and substance. There is no story and no ideas.
I do, however, praise Mitchell’s experimentation with language. Black Swan Green is a good example of Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia: a novel is comprised of different speeches and linguistic variety (e.g. narrator’s voice, character’s conversation, national language, etc.). Although the way Jason precociously thinks and speaks is not believable, I found myself writing several of Jason’s musings:

The world won’t leave things be. It’s always injecting endings into beginnings. Leaves tweezer themselves from these sweeping willows. Leaves fall into the lake and dissolve into slime. Where’s the sense in that? Mum and ad fell in love, had Julia, had me. They fall out of love, Julia moves off to Edinburg, Mum to Cheltenham, and Dad to Oxford with Cynthia. The world never stops unmasking what the world never stops making” (295).

This is a wonderful quote about the vicissitudes of Jason’s life. But amidst these insights, Mitchell says nothing new about family, loss, one’s country, and navigating one’s way in the world as a thirteen year old boy.