Abradacabra

It’s an illusion. When it works we temporarily believe with all our heart and soul, even though we know it's an illusion.  It happens to me when listening to a great piece of music.  The real world falls away; the music creates an alternate reality which my brain accepts as a complete, self-contained, and satisfying space.  All that I need and want is there; if I just surrender, truly believe, I will be enriched.

 

The creator (composer, author, actor, whatever) needs great technical skill to bring this off.  He must be on intimate terms with his medium; he must know every nook and cranny, every nuance and subtlety.  And he must use consummate skill in stitching together his work so that no seam shows, no evidence of his craft is left visible. We just believe.  And he also must have an underlying message, something important that gets communicated without ever being explicitly stated.

The wizardry displayed in David Mitchell’s prose continues to impress me.  Cloud Atlas is downright virtuosic.  The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is more constrained, but nonetheless impressive.  So in working my way back through Mitchell’s fiction the next step was Black Swan Green.  It’s a straightforward first-person narrative of one year in the life of a young British teen.  No sci-fi here, no narrative jumbles, nothing but a traditional narrative.

Yes, it’s an eventful year for Jason, the main character, but the primary strength of the book is not plot but rather the prose itself.  There’s dialect and dialogue, there’s a good bit of superficial detail, there are lots of words, but none of it seems the least bit contrived.  The main character is totally believable and lovable (I wonder how much is autobiographical.).  It’s a credible and realistic depiction of what that awkward age actually feels like. And there are lessons to be learned here.

Maybe I’m just a naïve reader.  Like the person watching the magician, I probably allow my attention to be diverted easily so I don’t notice what’s ‘really’ happening.  But I don’t actually want to know how he does the trick.  I like being entranced.  I want to believe in magic.