“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
Sceptre 2008 (first published 2006)
288 pages

As a part of Weekly Geeks 12, I’ll be posting reviews as answers to questions posted at this earlier post here!

A question from bybee:

» I heard that Black Swan Green is a coming-of-age novel. Is that correct?

Indeed it is! It’s a lot of other things too, but mostly it’s the story of thirteen months of the life of thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor in a small village in the English countryside in 1982. Margaret Thatcher is prime minister, the Falklands War is going on, and Jason struggles with his life: growing up, tolerating an older sister, hiding the fact that he stammers, avoiding bullies, and trying to decipher those strange creatures known as girls.

It also touches other social themes like bullying and divorce and racial prejudice and finding acceptance among your peers and doing the right thing, but yes, it is a coming-of-age novel. (There have been comparisons to Catcher in the Rye. I have no comment on that, because I haven’t read it!)

And questions from Joy Renee:

» How was Point-of-View handled? Was there a single POV character or did it alternate among two or more. Was it always clear whose eyes and mind were filtering?

The book was in the first person, Jason’s point of view. No problems with alternating POVs in this one. I really liked him — he made me cringe and smile and remember how awkward things are when you’re thirteen, and how things that don’t seem to matter much to us now were a matter of life and death then.

» How was language used to set tone and mood?

Jason comes off as sometimes awkward but mostly likeable and he does sound like he’s thirteen. (Some of the observations he make might make you wonder if he really is thirteen, though, even when you know he’s a very smart boy.) The language he uses, the description of his everyday life — what music is playing, what cigarettes the older boys are smoking, what David — sorry, for some reason I keep associating the author’s name with the protagonist Jason is having for breakfast — evokes the time period well. (Well, I wasn’t a teenager in the 80s, but it seems real enough to me.) He stammers, and he does his best to hide it from the other kids, knowing that he’ll be the butt of their jokes if he’s ever found out. Despite that, Jason’s also wry and funny and sharp, and he makes you want to root for him to the end.

David Mitchell has a speech impediment himself. I found this article where he talks about language and register and choosing the right words very interesting!

» Was the prose dense or spare? Were sentences generally simple or complex?

Generally it wasn’t so dense. Sentences were quite simple and easy to follow.

» How was metaphor used? Were associations fresh or did they tend toward cliché? Did they add to your understanding of the theme?

I think David Mitchell is one of those rare authors who could get away with any metaphor he wanted to, cliché or not. Seriously, I’ve only read two books by him, this book and number9dream, and I think I have a crush on him. Eeeh, anyway. I’m no good at these things. Here are a few lines from Jason (who also is secretly a poet):

The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and my future. The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I’ll die in. (Has it been built yet?) Cars’re rooms. So are woods. Skies’re ceilings. Distance’re walls. Wombs’re rooms made of mothers. Graves’re rooms made of soil.

» What was the central or organizing theme?

Growing up, I guess. Finding out who you are. Pretty much your standard coming-of-age story. :)

» How does the title relate to the story? Was it fitting?

Black Swan Green is the name of the village Jason lives in. The joke is that there are no swans in the village, black or otherwise. The whole book is set in Black Swan Green.

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Black Swan Green was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007. This is also my fourth book for the Man Booker Challenge!

The Giver by Lois Lowry
Houghton Mifflin (1993)
192 pages

This is one of those books that I don’t really have anything much to say about. It seems like everyone has read the book, and most of those who have read it loved it. I liked it a lot, though it won’t make it into any sort of favourite books lists of mine. I especially liked the main character, Jonas.

This book won the Newbery Medal in 1994.

It’s the future, and everything is perfect. No issues, no problems. Family members get together and talk about their feelings, everyone is polite, there’s no hunger or poverty or war, and everything is carefully planned and executed. Everything and everyone is equal, the same, normal. Welcome to the future: utopia has never been this flawed.

Everything starts out very smoothly. Jonas’s community seemed like a very nice place to live in, and I began to wonder what was wrong with this world Lowry has created. After a while, though, the sameness of everything gets a bit disquieting, and when I realised what was missing — colours, memory, music, truth, human emotions — I was rather freaked out by the whole thing. Jonas’s father and the baby that was released was bad enough, but when Jonas’s parents just laugh when he asks whether they love him, it gave me a shudder. Use another word, they say. “Love” is not a precise word, they say: “[it's] a very generalised word, so meaningless it’s become almost obsolete”.

Lovely little place, this utopia. Looks like I’m not moving there after all. Any list about books concerning dystopian fiction should have The Giver in it, that’s what I think.

I like the ending, uncertain as it is. Not only Jonas gets to make his choice and struggle with what comes with it, we get to decide ourselves what happens. It left me thinking long after I closed the book.

I have the other two books by Lois Lowry which are loosely related to The Giver in my reading list: Gathering Blue and Messenger. I think I’ll also pick up Lowry’s Number the Stars one of these days.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Virago Press (2003) (First published 1948)
360 pages

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink”, writes Cassandra Mortmain in her journal, and that’s how this heady mixture of romance and coming-of-age story set in the 1930s Britain begins. Cassandra is an aspiring writer, living in a run-down castle with her sister Rose, along with their brother, stepmother and father. Here’s the catch: they’re so poor that they can’t afford decent meals at times. Cassandra observes: “I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic, two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud.” Cassandra’s father wrote a very successful novel years before and has written nothing since. Cassandra dreams of becoming a writer herself, so she goes around “capturing” her family and her home in her journal. When two American brothers — one of them the heir to the estate which includes the castle where Cassandra’s family is living in — return to England, Rose tries to court one of them as a way out from poverty, with rather hilarious results at times.

The book is a collection of Cassandra journal entries, so all are written in the first person. (Dodie Smith is also the author of The 101 Dalmatians, which I haven’t read.) She probably has the most charming voice I’ve ever come across — she’s witty and wry, precocious and naive at the same time. I love the first two parts — or was it the first one-and-a-half? — and the last part not so much. Cassandra grows up, of course, over the course of the year, and the later parts reflect this. I rather liked Cassandra more when she was happier and more pragmatic.

Her father reminds me of mine, actually. I wanted to march up to him at one point and ask him whether he has bipolar disorder as well — he certainly acts like he does! He’s the eccentric writer all the way — solitary and secretive and takes note of the strangest things, leaving his family wondering whether he really is mad. I liked the characters: Stephen, the servant turned family but mostly still servant who’s desperately in love with Cassandra; Topaz, the stepmother who sometimes wander around nude to commune with nature; the wealthy American brothers; even Rose at her most selfish and, of course, Cassandra herself.

The book came across to me as dreamy and funny and strange. The ending is bittersweet and fitting. If there’s a novel that I’ll remember the first and last sentences, it will be this one — I could still almost see Cassandra scribbling “I love you, I love you, I love you” in the margins of the journal as she runs out of space.

Apparently there’s a film made in 2003 based on the book, hence the cover of the paperback I read. (It was the library’s only copy.) I generally dislike covers for book tie-ins of films; I’d pick up another version if I have a choice. No real reason for this; just me being a snob, I guess. :P

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Also, this book was recced by Nikki for the Herding Cats challenge. This actually means I’ve covered the “read three books” requirement for the challenge, but hey, there’s nothing against going above and beyond requirements, right? Especially when you have a rec list with more than six hundred items on it. XD

Winter Rose by Patricia A McKillip
ATOM (2002)
272 pages

I think Patricia A McKillip is one of those authors one either loves or has a very difficult time trying to get into. It’s her writing — her deliberate, beautiful prose and how it makes it really hard, sometimes, to see what’s actually happening because you’re blinded by the language. I think she does it on purpose . . . there’s probably some sort of hidden agenda: let’s sneakily cover up the plot with beautiful language!

Winter Rose is the story of Rois, who lives with her sister and their father on a farm. Rois is as familiar with the woods as she is of her own home, running around barefoot collecting flowers and herbs in the rain or sun, bringing them back for her practical, sensible sister Laurel. One day, by a spring covered by rose briars, she first sees Corbet Lynn. Corbet, whom everyone else says rode into the village, was returning to rebuild his ancestral home at Lynn Hall. But what Rois saw is this:

That’s how I saw him at first: as a fall of light, and then something shaping out of the light. So it seemed. I did not move; I let the water stream silently down my wrist. There was a blur of gold: his hair. And then I blinked, and saw his face more clearly.

I must have made some noise then. Perhaps I shifted among the wild fern. Perhaps I sighed. He looked toward me, but there was too much light; I must have been a blur of shadow in his eyes.

Then he walked out of the light.

Pretty, isn’t it.

Laurel is caught by the stranger’s beauty as Rois is caught by the mysteries of his past. Rois gets entangled even further as she tries to solve Corbet’s mystery. The whole thing is beautiful and sombre and dark and otherworldly, in this curious, quiet countryside where a murder happens and the only reactions the people give are of curiosity, and all the villagers seem to do is discuss the past of Lynn Hall. And then there’s the complex relationships between the characters. Even until the end everything is still complicated, and I ached for Rois and Corbet, and Laurel and her fiancé, and Rois’s father.

I picked up this book because it was recommended after I finished Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock, which is based on the ballad of Tam Lin, just like Winter Rose. (One of these days I really should find out what Tam Lin is really about.) This also book made me go about hunting for other books by McKillip, though I haven’t been really successful. Aside from The Riddle-Master’s Game, the only other book I’ve found is The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. Hopefully the library will pay attention to my suggestion forms and I’ll get to read some of her other books too!

Also! Apparently there is a sequel of sorts called Solstice Wood. Hmm.

The Sandman Volume 9: The Kindly Ones by Neil Gaiman
Illustrated by Marc Hempel, Richard Case, D’Israeli, Teddy Kristiansen, Glyn Dillon, Charles Vess, Dean Ormston and Kevin Nowlan
Vertigo (1996)
352 pages

Despite having another two volumes to the Sandman series after The Kindly Ones, this volume is definitely the climax of the series, where Gaiman attempts (quite successfully, I must say) to tie up the loose ends from all the previous storylines.

Now, when you have eight volumes and numerous subplots with various loose ends to tie, you have a lot of stories and a lot of characters — the thickness of this volume testifies to that — and I was struggling to remember what happened earlier, especially in The Doll’s House and Seasons of Mist. I read those first volumes very long ago, it seems. Rose’s story, especially, has grown really vague to my mind. But I did love the story that one of the old women told her (about a man who promised to marry a woman but didn’t), and the illustrations done for the story.

If there’s one thing about this collection that irritates me, it’s how it tries to make a reference to almost everyone and everything the series had touched before, so it gets a little long-winded at points. And this volume wouldn’t be able to stand alone, and won’t make much sense if read out of order. Start from the beginning and don’t skip volumes (like I did!).

I didn’t quite like the artwork when I first started, but I guess it grew on me.

This book also made me cheer so hard for Matthew the crow. I had always liked him, but here he’s just wonderful.

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The Wake by Neil Gaiman
Illustrated by Michael Zulli, Jon J Muth and Charles Vess
Vertigo (1997)
192 pages

Here is your epilogue, the ending of the series. This was sombre and a little bit slow, as it tries to wrap up whatever’s left to wrap up. We get to see a whole lot of people in the Dreaming this time, characters ordinary and curious, talking about their experiences with Dream and dreams and the Dreaming. This volume also made me love Matthew even more. There are a lot of things covered here — from loyalty to mortality and the choices that some of the characters make, and mourning and loving and moving on.

I have problems remembering what happened before, and that kind of brought down my enjoyment of this volume. (What was the deal Will Shakespeare made with Morpheus? I forget. Also, this probably means I will have to check out The Tempest — thanks to his story here and partly to Dan Simmon’s Ilium.)

The second-to-last story in the volume was the one I liked most. The illustration was done in a style that I really liked, almost like Chinese ink-drawings; befitting to the story being told, I guess.

This is a great end to a wonderful series. I’m always a bit sad when I get to the ending of a series, but then again, the best thing about getting to the end is being able to look back to the beginning and think, Oh, so that was where all that was heading, and think how very well everything was done.