For one lad, an unforgettable year

Black Swan Green

A Novel

David Mitchell

Random House: 298 pp., $23.95

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QUICK now: 1982. What events made that year, assuming you are old enough to remember?

Having trouble? 1982 seems not to have left much of a mark. According to a recent informal survey, two out of two people couldn’t come up with more than “1981 we built the new house” and “Wasn’t it ’83 the U.S. invaded Grenada?”

Maybe it is 1982’s very forgettableness that prompted David Mitchell (listed among Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists” and short-listed twice for the Booker Prize) to make it the prominent frame of his new novel, “Black Swan Green.” One thinks of John Updike, with his brilliantly titled “Memories of the Ford Administration”: While the attractions of a year like 1963 are obvious, the vacuum of a collective memory blip offers a challenge.

Thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor has no problem recalling 1982. He’s living it in the English village of the title, notable mainly for rancor between old-time farmers and the fancy housing development “townies,” for fear of “gyppos” and “homos,” and for having not one swan.

Still, the village knows how to keep its secrets, much like a 13-year-old. And Jason -- a.k.a. “Unborn Twin,” “Maggot,” and “Thing” to his older sister and “Eliot Bolivar,” the parish gazette’s precocious poet -- is writing his chronicle of events, both public and private, apparently pretty much as they unfold. “I’m cutting out stuff from the newspapers and magazines.... But all this excitement’ll never turn dusty and brown in archives and libraries. No way. People’ll remember everything about the Falklands till the end of world.”

Not only Maggie Thatcher’s weird Falklands War rises up from the dustbin of history in this tour-de-force of a year brought back to life. In a similar vein of irony by hindsight, Jason’s pal, “Moron” Moran, boasts of having “Betamax, of course! VHS’s going extinct.” There’s the weird packaged food: fruit Polos, Heinz Meatballs, Twiglets. (Dad happens to be a Big Cheese Puffball in sales for the Greenland grocery mega-chain.) The novel’s soundtrack mixes Eurythmics, Elvis Costello and other ‘80s revolutionaries. Most delectably, there is the language -- chewy period cliches from the mouths of pompous adults, salty gypsy dialect and the transitory goodies of teen slang. Moran “pongs of gravy.” “Dead sarky, Mum can be.” “Skill,” “ace” and “brill” are robust superlatives, but by year’s end our hero is withered by a popular kid telling him, “ ‘Only space cadets ... say “epic” anymore, Taylor.’ ” In short, Mitchell writes dialogue to die for.

Speech in “Black Swan Green” is more than mere entertainment. If Unborn Twin is Jason’s interior alter ego, Hangman is his sworn assassin. Hangman is named for a classroom game during which Jason found himself blocked from saying “nightingale” because of a stammer. “I imagine him in the baby room at Preston Hospital playing eeny, meeny, miney, mo. I imagine him tapping my koochy lips, murmuring down at me, Mine.”

By 1982, life has become a desperate battle to outfox Hangman by hiding behind euphemisms, of strangled headshakes mistaken for rudeness, silences marked down to stupidity. But needless to say, kids at the comprehensive school are ace at sniffing out a kid’s weakness. Meanwhile, in another kind of explosive silence, the Taylor nuclear family looks headed for destruction.

Jason’s stammer plays one major thematic role in “Black Swan Green.” The other central theme is violence. Within violence, bullying. Not for nothing, then, are we in the year of the Falklands. When Britain wins, the papers praise, “Great British guts and Great British leadership.” But Jason, until now obsessed by war and heroism, learns that the fleeing enemy were mostly “just conscripts and Indians.” “Some of the ones they left behind got killed by bayonets.... What a 1914 way to die in 1982.”

Fear, shame, secrets, bullying. Silence, gift of speech, speaking out. As the seasons progress, the lines connecting all these become more and more visible. Mitchell, apparently of the show-and-tell school of fiction writing, is not shy about spelling out lessons to be drawn and acted upon, such as “Hankering for security or popularity makes you weak and vulnerable.”

If this at times gives “Black Swan Green” the flavor of a novel for so-called young adults, reader be warned: Along with passages of dream-sharp beauty, there are images of a nightmarish brutality that burn on in the mind long after the fine, final line.

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Kai Maristed is the author of the novels “Broken Ground,” “Out After Dark” and “Fall.”