Fiction: Who really believes that schooldays are the best days of one's life? Adulthood must hold few pleasures for such a person. Who would want to relive the tedium of the classroom, the casual physical and verbal bullying, the agonies of puberty, the minutiae of school uniforms and rules, the uncertainty, the shyness?
If that person is you, take Black Swan Green as an antidote. Take the full course. Nostalgia will never be the same again.
Jason Taylor is 13. He is an in-between boy at an in-between age, a boy not of the first rank, as he knows only too well, but not of the third either, at least not to begin with. He suffers from a stammer and is being treated for it, a shameful secret. He understands none of the sexually charged insults he and his friends throw at each other. He is still at the age when kissing girls seems unpromising, although he is mature enough to know that it will eventually be necessary, as will the peculiarly mechanical act of intercourse, as described in his biology textbook, and which promises to be unpleasant and even less rewarding than kissing. He writes poetry - that gayest of all activities in a world in which "gay" is the worst insult - which he publishes in the parish newsletter under the pseudonym Eliot Bolivar, and he lives in constant fear of discovery - of that and all his secrets. His parents' marriage is shaky and his sister hates him.
Jason is a kind of Prufrock (that "Eliot" in the pseudonym is no accident), almost equally romantic and naïve, and tells his tale from the conviction that we will understand because we too have been in that inferno, that we may never have escaped because adolescence is no more than a specific case of the general proposition that life screws you up.
The year is 1982, the year of Margaret Thatcher's Falklands War and the beginning of her recession. The coarsening and brutalisation of public life represented by Thatcherism, finds its correlative in Jason's experience: boys and girls play vicious games on a frozen lake and thoughtlessly invade other people's gardens; they bully each other; they maintain a rigid class system that ensures the weak linger at the margins of everything, starving for acceptance or respect; their relationships are essentially transactions in which the powerful control the market, in which physical strength, sarcasm or recklessness are the sterling currency.
Childhood has always been thus, we may say, but it is Mitchell's achievement, here, to make the village stand for the world, in the same way as in Cloud Atlas he did the reverse, finding in the universal, the personal.
The straight, first person narrative of Black Swan Green may surprise readers who have enjoyed the structural inventiveness and pastiche of the earlier books. However, Mitchell has not entirely abandoned those devices that give an exceptional feeling of connectedness, of karma even, to his earlier work. Black Swan Green represents 13 months in the life of a 13-year-old, 13 chapters, one for each month. Each chapter is almost completely self-contained, almost a short story in its own right. Characters from previous novels make guest appearances - Eva, the wife of Vyvian Ayrs the composer from Cloud Atlas, for example, is at hand to give Jason advice about poetry. The first chapter is almost a classic genre ghost story, in what is ultimately a very fine and tightly structured novel .
Psychologists have compared speech impediments to icebergs in which the vast bulk of the condition is invisible; the fear of certain sounds or words, situational fears, anxiety, shame and a feeling of loss of control - these constitute the reality of the condition for the stammerer. In this regard, Mitchell pulls off a beautifully ironic piece of ventriloquism; the narrator's voice is pitched perfectly and entirely credibly; the dialogue never falters.
Jason never comes to terms with his curse, although he realises that it needn't define him despite the sneers and contempt of the village bullies. But underlying all his relationships - even at the point where he discovers that kissing is not an unpleasant activity - is the thought that he will never be able to express his true self and consequently will never be in control of his life - an apt metaphor for the human condition in general.
Black Swan Green By David Mitchell Sceptre, 371 pp. £16.99
William Wall's recent novel, This Is The Country, is out in paperback (Sceptre). Brandon Books will publish his first collection of stories, No Paradiso, in August