`Black Swan Green': a Sensitive, Suffering Boyhood Tour De Force

``Black Swan Green'' by David Mitchell; Random House ($23.95)

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David Mitchell is one of those writers who seem to have sprung, fully developed, from the forehead of some god of Art. He's only in his mid-30s yet has four novels under his belt - the one before this the wildly inventive, structurally exquisite ``Cloud Atlas'': six novellas arranged, not like Russian nesting dolls (as some reviewers put it), but like one of M.C. Escher's lithographs of stairs in which going up or down is all relative, depending on your point of view.

Mitchell's latest novel, ``Black Swan Green,'' is also carefully structured - 13 stand-alone chapters make up a novel about a year and a month in a 12- to 13-year-old boy's life - but it's much more accessible than his previous tours-de-force. Clearly, this is Mitchell's coming-out tale.

Set in 1982, it's about Jason Taylor of Worcestershire, England, a sensitive lad suffering from a stammer who publishes his poems in the parish magazine under the pseudonym "Eliot Bolivar." Mitchell, interviews reveal, grew up in Worcestershire, suffered from a stammer, and published poems in the parish magazine under the pseudonym "James Bolivar."

But this book is far too artfully crafted to be a mere memoir. This portrait of the artist as a very young man was obviously painted by an older, practiced hand - it's full of universal truths, not just individual facts.

All those truths come from a boy's voice that rings clear as a bell. Here are just a few:

"Games and sports aren't really about taking a part or even about winning. Games and sports're really about humiliating your enemies."

The Falklands War figures in this novel, and Jason thinks, "War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery."

On men: "Often I think boys don't become men. Boys just get papier-mached inside a man's mask. Sometimes you can tell the boy is still in there."

One of my favorites: "Good moods're as fragile as eggs. ... Bad moods're as fragile as bricks."

On a ritual found in every culture: "Dancing's a brain the dancers're only cells of. Dancers think they're in charge but they're obeying ancient orders."

And then, the essence of the book, which is shown in so many brilliant ways: "The world won't leave things be. It's always injecting endings into beginnings. Leaves tweezer themselves from these weeping willows. Leaves fall into the lake and dissolve into slime. ... The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. ... But who says the world has to make sense?"

The world doesn't make sense and it certainly isn't fair, but it's predictably cruel. ``Black Swan Green'' will remind adult readers (if they've forgotten) of the cruelties of childhood, of school and its bullies. No one escapes completely, and some people suffer more than others:

Picked-on kids act invisible to reduce the chances of being noticed and picked on. Stammerers act invisible to reduce the chances of being made to say something we can't. Kids whose parents argue act invisible in case we trigger another skirmish. The Triple Invisible Boy, that's Jason Taylor.

Mitchell's Cloud Atlas'' summoned to mind the seafaring novels of Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, but the ur-text forBlack Swan Green'' has to be ``Lord of the Flies.'' In one horrific, gripping scene, Jason is actually forced to read a passage from William Golding's novel aloud to his class. Oh, it's not Nature that's red in tooth and claw, it's human nature. And yet, what we endure is surely what makes us who we are. Even if what we become seems so different from what we were.

And that's where Escher comes in, for his art inspires the novel too. In his bedroom, Jason even has a "poster of black angelfish turning into white swans." And, for a great deal of the book, those are the only swans in the village named for them. Still, there are mythic birds aplenty who lend their names: Jason lives in Kingfisher Meadows, the fall festival is called the Goose Fair, and so forth. The woods near his home figure prominently, as do the Malvern Hills, the fields and farms and villages. Mitchell has probably penned the first ode to Worcestershire ever written, and he makes it sound lovelier than the Lake District.

There's so much to recommend this book, but my space is limited. In short, then, the characters are wonderful - sympathetic, funny, perfectly drawn. The memories of childhood on the cusp of adolescence are poignant, compelling. Best of all is the sensory-soaked writing. A graduate student could write a dissertation on Mitchell's sense of smell: "White wine smells of Granny Smiths, paint-stripper, and tiny flowers." At the other end of the olfactory spectrum, "the school bus stinks of boys, burps, and ashtrays." (Incidentally, Jason's favorite smells are Wite-Out and bacon rind.)

You don't have to have read anything else by David Mitchell to love this novel, but if you have read ``Cloud Atlas,'' you will see a familiar face or two - and they fit seamlessly into this book. Thus far, this is my favorite novel of 2006, and I won't be surprised if it turns out to be the best book I read all year.

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(c) 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.