I think I am developing a serious author crush on David Mitchell. I am a 31 year old married woman and yet David (we're on a first name basis now because I've read two of his books, see) creates the 13 year old character of Jason Taylor in such a manner that Jason becomes EveryKid to me. I feel his adolescent pain, fictional construct though it may be, because I felt that kind of pain when I was a pre-teen. Once again, David brilliantly captures the spirit of his protagonist and the time through the excellent use of the vernacular. It's believable, it's real and it ain't The Queen's English, thank goodness.
This novel won me over when it wham bam tied into the Frobisher story of "Cloud Atlas". It was a literary Easter Egg. At the time I read it, I had forgotten that the Frobisher vignette was possibly a "fictional construct" within the world of "Cloud Atlas" but since that novel was a fictional construct anyway, I guess I don't care too much that the Frobisher story was a fictional construct within a fictional construct thus rendering the possibility that *gasp!* Black Swan Green is a fictional construct, too. Tant pis! I don't know about the rest of you Mitchell fans, but I'm thinking he's creating his own fictionally constructed literary oeuvre to an ulterior end.
Anyhow, back to Frobisher. I absolutely loved it when the old bat Crommelynck said of Frobisher's untimely self-inflicted demise, "Robert was obsessed of recurrence eternal. Recurrence is the heart of his music. We live exactly the same life, Robert believed, and die exactly the same death again, again, again, to the same demisemequaver. To eternity." Bloody brilliant because it's so TRUE in this case, isn't it? Robert Frobisher WILL live the same life and die the same death again and again and again because David Mitchell wrote it and we read it. Frobisher will never die by anything other than a shotgun blast.
In that same vein, Jason Taylor's parents will always get divorced. By picking up the story of a young boy and remembering (constructing!) his life through vignettes with themes important to most teenagers, I wonder if David Mitchell was trying to remind us that there are common life lessons that must be learned by everybody; social lessons that each generation must identify and conquer; and global issues that lead the inevitable demise of global empires. Basically, Mitchell is saying, history repeats itself because each person/generation/empire ignores, can't comprehend or deliberately forgets the lessons learnt by those who came before them.
It seems themes of recurrence, and thus time, endings and beginnings, are a popular playground for David. I, for one, have permamnent dibs on the merry-go-round.