Black Swan Green by David Mitchell – A book review

Dear Jason Taylor

Hope you’re doing well.

Yesterday, I chanced upon this big fat green book and realized that it was about you. Thank you for sharing about the thirteenth year of your life – As Madame Crommelynck puts it ‘Ackkk, a wonderful, miserable age. Not a boy, not a teenager. Impatience but timidity too. Emotional incontinence.’

I had never heard of a place called Black Swan Green in Worcestershire. A few pages into your story and I thought, ‘Is this going to be another ‘Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha’?’ Have you read it? It’s by Roddy Doyle and is about a boy like you.

I know you stutter but I’m sure you’ll get over it. I know how ugly people can get when they discover that; it’s difficult yeah. I like the way you have interspersed incidents and situations across chapters; they seem like short stories but are yours and are interwoven into that one year. I think that’s super duper. They’re full of discovery and adventure. I understand being a part of the herd is important, else you’re treated like a pariah dog, and a very few can stand against it and in turn handle and survive the bestowed agony but I’m proud of you Jace.

I’m sorry but I have to say this – as I read your accounts, a few of your rambling thoughts and derived wisdom seemed a bit too much or unreal for a thirteen year old but yes, on further pondering over it myself, I felt it’s possible; it all depends on what and how much and when and how you’ve seen things. There is more wisdom packed in your thoughts than in most self-help books I’ve read. I particularly liked this one - Me, I want to kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.

You’ve experienced a lot and what I like is the clarity with which you have expressed your thoughts and the happenings; there doesn’t seem to be a clouding between the incidents and their recordings. Friendship, your first smoke, your first kiss, the losing of a priced possession, the near loss of innocence, being bullied to the verge of breaking down, the finally doing the right thing; it’s all there. I liked ‘Solarium’ the best; Madame Crommelynck comes across as a cranky old woman but I’d have loved to meet her; she came across as someone who doesn’t mince words or at least now doesn’t. I read names like Robert Frobisher and Vyvyan Ayrs in your memoirs, related to Ms. Crommelynck and that reminds me that I’ve read these names before, probably in a book called the ‘Cloud Atlas’. I simply love her thoughts on beauty and poetry –

…‘T.S. Eliot expresses it so – the poem is a raid on the inarticulate. I, Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, agree with him. Poems who are not written yet, or not written ever, exists here. The realm of the inarticulate. Art.’ She put another cigarette in her mouth and this time I was ready with her dragon lighter, ‘fabricated of the inarticulate is beauty. Even if is themes is ugly. Silver moons, thundering seas, clichés of cheese, poison beauty. The amateur thinks his words, his paints, his notes makes the beauty. But the master knows his words is just the vehicle in who beauty sits. The master knows he does not know what beauty is. Test this. Attempt a definition now. What is beauty?’

…‘Difficult?’ (Her ashtray was in the shape of a curled girl, I saw.) ‘Impossible! Beauty is immune to definition. When beauty is present, you know. Winter sunrise in dirty Toronto, one’s new lover in an old café, sinister magpies on a roof. But is the beauty of these made? No. Beauty is here, that is all. Beauty is.’

Sometimes relationships are just a name and not what they seem. Just like Black Swan Green – you mentioned there never were any swans there – neither black, nor green, nor white – no swans. Well, sometimes people are also not what they seem. I’m sorry to hear about your parents and particularly about Ross Wilcox; do you think he deserved what he got? Your stories hint a lot of karma; do you believe in it? And sometimes, I hope you agree, we too aren’t what we put on display – the swan surfaces because it’s beautiful and intriguing in the midst of others but it disappears when we’re alone. I’m glad you met the gypsies – our hatred towards them is the same as theirs towards us, only the perspectives are different. And when you heard from them and I from you, it surprised me about the things they said – so true, we were never shown the mirror.

There – you’ve got me contemplating like you. When I started this letter to you, I didn’t know what to write and like always ended up writing a lot. So now, here, I stop. Someday, I’ll read you again. Take care.

Madame Crommelynck talking about herself

‘It is difficult to avoid, yes.’ Madame Crommelynck kept her eyes on Robert Frobisher. ‘This girl wants my forgiveness, before she dies. She begs me, “I was eighteen! Robert’s devotions were just a … a… flattery game for me! How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body?” Oh, I pity her. I want to forgive her. But here is the truth.’ (Now she looked at me.) ‘I abhor that girl! I abhorred her all my life and I do not know how to stop to abhor her.’

My rating: 8/10

Image courtesy

Book cover - https://www.kaiandsunny.com/publishing/22_black_swan_green_hb.php

David Mitchell - https://stuttertalk.com/tag/black-swan-green/

The sea, the sea by Iris Murdoch - A book review

I’ve been wondering since I picked up the book; why ‘The sea, the sea’, why not just ‘The sea’? And as I read the last few words, I guess I know now. It’s a call of despair, of longing, of a melancholic meditation where it’s a fruitless, failed attempt of breathing right and keeping your eyes closed and trying to understand and believe and trust things and situations that you don’t want to but probably must; numerous thoughts like wild waves only thrashing you against the abrasive rocks, destroying your meditation, your peace if there is any.

Is LOVE a four letter word? Let’s not waste time here - it IS a four letter word. And so is PAIN and HURT. Ask Charles Arrowby, an imperious theatre stalwart, loved and despised equally by the marionettes in his life. And almost always, as he pulls the strings, they remain taut for a long time and don’t really break till they do. And still his so called friends, colleagues, past love interests and James, the only family he has, cling to him - a despot who steers relationships, manipulates them, breaks them with an unflustered detachment.

Charles has moved to ‘Shruff’s end’, a house he’s bought by the sea for his self-imposed retirement from the theatre and all people. He’s decided to peacefully write his memoirs here and spend the rest of his life in solitude. But ‘Iris Murdoch’ won’t leave him alone. She places his life back to him when he thinks he’s already lived it. Charles comes across Hartley, his childhood sweetheart, who’d run away from him without a trace or explanation then. Cupid is cunning and doesn’t see age (Charles is above 60) or a marriage to be a shield for his arrows; he only strikes.

Which one is funnier, the heart or the mind? A drowning man clutches to a straw; Charles clutches to his memories of Hartley, to the play of fate. He now sees why he’s come to this place, of all places, a connection that existed, exists so strong; how can he let go of it now? What unfolds is a tenacious contrivance; Charles plays God, destines his own destiny and that of others, primarily Hartley; his unshaken beliefs and ramblings silencing the shrieking thoughts and woes of others. Does a despot know that s/he’s a despot; does a lunatic undulating between sanity and insanity, know that s/he’s a lunatic? How would they; isn’t it why we relate it to obsession. They’re right because they think they’re right and they think it very strongly and passionately; they aren’t hypocrites, they are believers and it’s only fair that they find it astounding why other’s are so plain, feeble, so dispassionate, tedious and wearisome.

“But supposing it should turn out in the end that such a love should lose its object, should it, whatever happened, lose its object? Some loves are not defeated by death, although it is not as easy as we think to love the dead. But there are pains and devices which defeat love more ingeniously. Would I at last absolutely lose Hartley because of a treachery or desertion on her part which should turn my love into hate? Could I begin to see her as cold, heartless, uncanny, a witch, a sorceress? I felt that this could never be, and I felt it as an achievement, almost as a mode of possession. As James said ‘If even a dog’s tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light.’ My love for Hartley was very nearly an end in itself. Twist and turn as she might, whatever happened she could not escape me now.”

“What indeed was I planning to do? I was in a state which I well knew was close to a sort of madness, and yet I was not mad. Some kinds of obsession, of which being in love is one, paralyse the ordinary free-wheeling of the mind, its natural open interested curious mode of being, which is sometimes persuasively defined as rationality. I was sane enough to know that I was in a state of total obsession and that I could only think, over and over again, certain agonizing thoughts, could only run continually along the same rat-paths of fantasy and intent.”

And entangled in this hullabaloo of affairs, deception and tragic deaths, the others play their parts, they enter and exit, they stay; the ambiance and tune changes – from a gloomy surrender to a maddening rage, from a calm melody to a tumultuous symphony. A silhouette of the spiritual and supernatural also flirts with the reader. Murdoch, like in her other stories presents a range of questions and none of them are really answered. You love and hate the characters, and more so because they manifest reality, their emotions are of this world. You’ll end up justifying the characters for their horrific, loving and/or indifferent acts; like a shrink you’ll try to understand them, you’ll want to make them understand. In the end, you’ll just end up making yourself understand.

How well a story resonates with you depends on when you pick it up and for me it couldn’t be a better time and situation. I felt, in bits and pieces living the emotions of most of the characters; of being obsessed, of hatred due to helplessness, of desire, of pangs of jealousy, of submissiveness, of dominance, of so called pragmatism and more importantly being immersed, deeply immersed in the sea of love.

In Hartley, I saw a resemblance of the female protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Disgrace’. I was also reminded of John Banville’s ‘The Sea’ when I went through these accounts. The sound of the sea relaxes, calms you down but somehow also has an agonizing effect, goading you to ponder, silencing you in your words but making your thoughts scream. Is that true for others as well?

Sooner or later, the sea throws back all that we put in it. The waves give back to Charles a longing and undesirable loneliness for all of his fastidious plans and rancor. Finally, he attempts to come to terms with it; he realizes that caring, love and desire cannot be in mere words, if it can’t be felt. There’s a very thick line between thinking, believing and doing.

LOVE indeed is a four letter word and yet it’s BEAUTIFUL (that’s nine!) and NECESSARY (nine again).

Can Lizzie’s (a former lover) words in a letter to Charles sum up to an attainment of peace in love?

“My love for you is quiet at last. I don’t want it to become a roaring furnace. If I could have suffered more I would have suffered more. Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth matter more and more as one grows older. Somehow let us not waste love, it is rare. Can we not love each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear? Love matters, not ‘in love’ Let there be no more partings now. Let there be peace between us now forever, we are no longer young. Love me Charles, love me enough.”

My rating – 9/10

Images courtesy:

Iris Murdoch picture - https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/client/iris-murdoch

Book cover - https://electricliterature.com/my-year-in-re-reading-after-40-5-the-sea-the-sea-by-iris-murdoch/