My first encounter with David Mitchell was Cloud Atlas: a strikingly unconventional and well-written book.

Black Swan Green is nothing like Cloud Atlas. This is a conventional book telling the story of a normal young boy: Jason, aged 13, living with his parents and older sister in a village in Worcestershire (in the middle of nowhere, that is). It deals with the usual early-teens anxieties: growing up, fitting in, the puzzling creatures called girls, etc. There is also a fair bit of English 1980s nostalgia, with references to pop music and other products of that time.

Jason struggles more than most boys at his age. He starts the game with two handicaps – he writes poetry, and even worse, he stammers. (But he only stammers if the word begins with an N or an S, so he thinks one sentence ahead and rephrases it to avoid those words. Which, of course, doesn’t work when he is asked in maths class how much 9 times 11 is. When that happens, Jason chooses to appear stupid rather than stammer.) The struggle to be popular, or at least not get beaten up or called gay or laughed at, takes up a lot of his energy. The petty cruelties of his friends are compounded by the equally petty quarrels of his parents. But the tone of the book is nevertheless positive, and Jason is never whiny. Throughout the book he slowly matures, growing a backbone and some character.

It’s not a fabulous book, but still a pretty good one. There is a believable character, easy to sympathise with, a fair amount of humour and a lot of raw honesty. There is enough happening to keep the story interesting, and it’s well enough written. But on the whole it just seems relatively… ordinary.

The main shortcoming was the boy’s “poetic” descriptions of things around him. He jumps too abruptly between teenage slang and this overblown self-conscious lyricism. On the other hand, that may be exactly what a 13-year-old with literary aspirations might produce. I don’t really know, I haven’t read anything actually written by a 13-year-old with literary aspirations.

Here’s a representative sample:

In my parents’ creamy bedroom I sat at Mum’s dressing table, spiked my hair with L’Oréal hair mousse, daubed an Adam Ant stripe across my face, and held her opal brooch over one eye. I looked through it at the sun for secret colours nobody’s ever named.

Salon’s review told me something about the author that I didn’t know:

… the autobiographical tone of “Black Swan Green” could be false, another one of Mitchell’s uncanny impressions, but it writhes with a loathing that would be mighty hard to fake.

[…]

All this amounts to a damning portrait of the pettiness of British middle-class life and an excellent argument for why a sensitive, aesthetically inclined young man might run off to Japan (as Mitchell did). Though it’s less playful and complex than his earlier books, it also feels more emotionally rooted – even if the emotion it’s rooted in is a still-raw disgust.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.