I sailed through this and found at its end that it had left me all feeling all stirred-up inside. In many ways, it's an unassuming novel (or, at least, so it appears on the surface) - 13 chapters charting a year and one month in the life of Jason Taylor, a boy growing up in Thatcher-era Worcestershire, wrapped up in the unforgiving politics and power shifts of his peers and held suspended with his family all about his, preoccupied with the mysteries of his time of life. Things happen, some of them quite interesting and others not so much (looked at from an outside perspective, as opposed to that of Jason himself), but it all retained my attention, balancing subtlety and eventfulness tremendously well.
It's written in vernacular - the argot of a 13 year old English boy - and sustainedly so, so that neither the voice itself nor any slipping from it ever intrudes. Works the trick of allowing glimpses of what's going on at the edges of the narration and the narrator's awareness without ever slipping into annoying over-naivety or preciosity, and likewise with the way that Mitchell develops story, character and theme, elegantly and unobstrusively but with a sure, definite hand. Whatever it is that real literature has, Black Swan Green has it - I think that this one's a stayer.
