Black Swan Green
by David Mitchell
Sceptre £16.99, 288 pages

Personally, I have always hated imperious reviewers who tell me what to write. Yet two years ago I defied the old do-unto-others saw, in a review of the shortlisted novel Cloud Atlas the day before the Man Booker was announced. “Should Cloud Atlas win the Booker Prize,” I wrote, “here’s hoping that David Mitchell will take the accolade as an opportunity to relax - to trust himself, to drop the frenetic one-man-band act, and daringly experiment with telling one story well.”

Recall, of course, that Cloud Atlas did not win the 2004 Booker, though judges allowed that it came in a close second. Nevertheless, in his new novel Black Swan Green Mitchell has (not that I have the cheek to take credit; he may never have seen that review) taken my advice.

In previous novels, Mitchell has played with chronology and multiple interlocking plot lines, spawning imitators such as Michael Cunningham (Specimen Days). Although the acrobatics have sometimes been impressive, one yearns to see what such a skilful writer would accomplish within the confines of a more traditional narrative structure. Black Swan Green is as traditional as could be.

Too traditional. I am sorry to report that while Mitchell was a good boy and did what Lionel told him to, the results are disappointing. Clearly my initial aversion to bossy reviewers was spot-on. As for what he should have tackled next, what did I know?

The irony of David Mitchell inspiring knock-offs is that he himself is a natural literary impressionist. In Black Swan Green he takes on the coming-of-age novel, like many distinguished predecessors: Thomas Wolfe, James Joyce, more recently Roddy Doyle. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with an author availing himself of a conventional form. Yet the more conventional the form, the more considerable the obligation to do something interesting with it. And I had the nagging sense of having read every page of Black Swan Green before.

The narrator, Jason Taylor, is 13, and at least not as annoying as the oh-so-wise child narrator of Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. This kid is tolerable company, and tells a decent yarn. Off in the boondocks of Worcestershire (where the author grew up), Jason is tormented because of his stammer, and obliged to hide his talent for writing poetry under a bushel, lest surrounding brutes bash him as “gay”. Even in the middle of nowhere, the world occasionally intervenes: a neighbourhood boy dies in the Falklands; travellers move into the area, to the organised horror of residents. Just as in Doyle’s Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha, the fact that the narrator’s parents are experiencing a slow-motion marital breakdown is unknown to him and smugly obvious to the reader.

Now, this is a perfectly readable, harmless book. But after the commercial and critical success of Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green is sure to be pushed with a massive amount of hype. It really ought to rise to a higher standard than “readable”. The local lingo is nicely captured, as is the gruff, nasty, defensive manner in which the barely pubescent talk to each other. Anecdotes are mildly amusing. But what is this book for?

That is not a specious question. Jason’s insights fall flat: “The world’s a headmaster who works on your faults. I don’t mean in a mystical or Jesus way. More how you’ll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch out for that step!” Jason’s eureka solution to his stammer near the end of the novel hardly seems worth waiting for: “By honestly not caring how long the other person’ll have to wait for me. Two seconds? Two minutes? No, two years... If I can reach this state of not caring, Hangman’ll remove his finger from my lips.” The boy’s musing about his adulthood is unremarkable: “Which girl’s carrying the other half of my kid, deep in those intricate loops? What’s she doing right now? What’s her name?”

Furthermore, sometimes our narrator does sound like Foer’s, slipping into the deadly whimsy of the too-cute-by-half: “If God made each minute last six months I’d be middle-aged by breakfast and dead by the time I got on the school bus.” Like Foer as well, and Kurt Vonnegut before him, Mitchell has strewn his text with graphics - a hand-written stammering chart, a scrawled note from Jason’s mother, a note from a schoolmate cut from newspaper headlines. But all the pictorial insertions are texts, and the illustrations contribute to nothing but a slightly higher bill at the printers.

What critics have most admired about Mitchell’s previous novels is their originality. Yet taken separately, each section of Cloud Atlas, for example, reveals itself as either an artful imitation of another writer’s work or a standard-issue iteration of a genre. The puzzle is imaginative; its pieces are derivative. Black Swan Green is one big standard-issue, a follow-the-rules sort of fiction that will offend no one, but neither will it likely linger in its reader’s mind. Truly brilliant writers often hew roughly to established forms, but they rarely colour completely within the lines.

Lionel Shriver’s novel “Double Fault” is published by Serpent’s Tail this week.