By Connie Nardini
The month of January is supposed to be a beginning, not the end of a beginning. To 13-year-old Jason Taylor it was both.
He is the January Man in David Mitchell’s 2006 coming-of-age-novel Black Swan Green. The story starts in the first month of Jason’s 13th year and ends, thirteen chapters later, in the first month of his 14th. So what happens to the January Man? Does he seem become a new person after these manic months of being lurched into adulthood, or is he still a beginning being? You must judge for yourself after you listen to his voice.
Jason lives in the land of teenage castes in his village in Worcestershire, England, called Black Swan Green in the 1982 period of Thatcherism. One the first ironies you learn is that Black Swan Green has no swans. In this swanless world, “Kids who are really popular get called by their first names, so Nick Yew is always just ‘Nick.’ Kids who are a bit popular like Gilbert Swinyard have sort of respectful nicknames like ‘Yardy.’ Next down are kids like me with piss-take names like . . . Nicholas Brier who’s ‘Nickerless Bra.’ It’s all ranks, being a boy, like in the army. If I called Gilbert Swinyard just ‘Swinyard,’ he’d kick my face in . . . so you have to watch out.”
Jason had another thing to watch out for – he stammered, but only his family knew this; he was adept at hiding this from his fellow “soldiers.” He calls his disability “Hangman.”
“Most people think stammering and stuttering are the same but they’re as different as diarrhea and constipation. Stuttering’s where you say the first bit of word but can’t stop from saying it over and over. St-st-stutter. Like that. Stammering is where you get stuck straight after the first bit of the word. Like this, st . . . AMmer!”
“My life divided itself into Before Hangman and After Hangman. The word ‘nightingale’ ka-boomed in my skull but it just wouldn’t come out. The ‘n’ got out okay but the harder I forced the rest, the tighter the noose got . . . When a stammerer stammers their eyeballs pop out, they go trembly like an evenly-matched arm wrestler, and their mouth gupper-gupper-guppers like a fish in the net. It must be quite a funny sight.”
Jason’s mother takes him to a speech therapist – a Mrs. De Roo – but Hangman knows better than to mess with her, so she never really sees the guppering. The Four Commandments for the Hangman are: 1) Thou shalt hide from speech therapists; 2) Thou shalt strangle Taylor when he is most nervous about stammering; 3) Thou shalt ambush Taylor when he is not nervous about stammering; and 4) Once Taylor is “Stutterboy” to the eyes of the world, he is YOURS.”
Another alter-ego includes the Unborn Twin. This one writes poetry under the pen-name Eliot Bolivar for the parish newsletter. This doppleganger is invited to discuss his work with an old woman who lived in the old, vacant vicarage, a Madame Crommelynk. She is extremely old and extremely opinionated about all of the arts, including poetry. When Jason saw her up close, “the old woman turned into an It. Sags ruckused its eyebags and eyelids. Its eyelashes been gummed into spikes. Delta of tiny red veins snaked its stained whites. Its irises misty like long buried marbles. Makeup dusted its mummified skin. Its grily nose was subsiding into its skullhole.”
Nevertheless, Madame inspired the Unborn Twin closer to being born by instilling some pride into the poetic part of our hero. This Jason has the lovely ability of turning nouns into verbs to “startilize” you. “Countless hundreds of birds, orbiting the village green once, elasticking longer, twice, winging shorter, three times, then, as if following an order, vanishing inside the tree again.”
The adults in this world usually lack any redeeming qualities. However, Jason often sees both sides of these prickly people who include his father and his friend’s fathers. He describes one such dad who is known as an irresponsible drunk: “Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you look at green, where’ve the yellow and blue gone?” He tries to console his best friend, Moran, with these words when Moran talks to Jason about his love for his (Moran’s) father. Jason’s teachers and relatives all seem bent on destroying the Unborn Twin’s need to exist.
So, the 13th chapter is called “January Man” just like the first. The reader must decide if the new 14-year-old is a whole person consisting of both fully-formed twins or not. Will Jason’s ride continue to be as bumpy or will it smooth out? Not even Hangman knows.
–
Previously in Connie’s Corner:
* “Heavier Than Air.” Nona Caspers creates a tapestry of small towns and chronicles the lives of people living there who have a hard time coming down to earth.
* “Pale Fire.” Nabokov creates a novel that doesn’t seem to have coherent plot but a story that contains a do-it-yourself kit.
* “Out Stealing Horses.” A coming-of-age story that reveals a father’s secret life during wartime.
* “An American In Iceland.” Answering the riddle: how many Icelanders does it take to change a light bulb?
* “The Physics of the Dalai Lama.” How Buddhism squares with quantum mechanics.
* “Finn.” Some kind of monster.
* “The Master Bedroom.” Betrayal, revelation, metaphor, and a swan in a dirty sheet.
* So Long, See You Tomorrow. The powerlessness of childhood and the untrustworthiness of adults.
* Diary of a Bad Year. A three-layer cake baked by J.M. Coetzee.
Posted on August 24, 2009