Outfoxing Hangman

Thomas Jones

• Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
  Sceptre, 371 pp, £16.99, May 2006, ISBN 0 340 82279 1

David Mitchell’s first book, Ghostwritten (1999), which describes itself as ‘a novel in nine parts’, is a collection of loosely interconnected stories. The protagonist of one will have a walk-on role in the next; a minor character from someone else’s story will later reappear as the narrator of their own. The first narrator is a member of a Japanese doomsday cult, the perpetrator of a poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway, now on the run in Okinawa. He makes a phone call to a secret emergency number, believing that this will summon the help of his cult’s secret service. ‘The dog needs to be fed,’ he says. The second narrator is a teenager who works in a secondhand record shop in Tokyo. He’s just about to leave for the day when the phone rings. ‘The dog needs to be fed,’ says a ‘soft, worried’ voice. He assumes it must be a wrong number, and thinks no more about it. But it delays him long enough for him to encounter someone he otherwise wouldn’t have done – and so the chain of unintended, unforeseeable and far-reaching consequences continues.