Living with the hangman

Your last novel, Cloud Atlas, told, with dazzling pastiche and panache, a series of multi-layered, interleafing, interrupted stories ranging from a 19th-century voyage of exploration to a futuristic dystopia. It also sold more than 400,000 copies and was voted Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year. How can you - how can anyone - follow that?

The answer comes with Black Swan Green. Instead of Mitchell's postmodern pyrotechnics, it is a surprisingly traditional coming-of-age-novel, set in a single time and place: a Worcestershire village in 1982. There's just one narrator, too - 13-year-old Jason Taylor, covert stammerer and anonymous poet. Yet it is not, he insists, as radical a departure as it at first appears. "To me the challenges you set yourself, the straitjacket, almost, is what impels creativity and forces ingenuity. Here the challenge was an almost trainspotterish reconstruction of the world as I saw aged 13.

"I've got about a third of the mental DNA as Jason. We both wrote poetry for the parish magazine which we slipped through the vicarage letter box under an assumed (and embarrassingly pretentious) name. And both of us have a stammer, too."

Until Mitchell mentions it, you tend not to notice: when you do, you catch the occasional microsecond of hesitation in front of some words beginning with the letter "s", the odd phrase broken by a quick intake of breath or sentence twisted slightly away from the obvious.

But although Mitchell has subsequently developed ways of minimising his stammer, the young Jason is infinitely more vulnerable. Revealing it would, he knows full well, lead to immediate social ignominy as "school stutterboy". "When a stammerer stammers, their eyeballs pop out, they go trembly red like an evenly matched arm wrestler and their mouth guppergupperguppers like a fish in a net," notes Jason. Even he'd laugh at the sight of someone struggling with an unpredictable, intermittent lock on speech - what he calls "Hangman" - if only he didn't have it himself.

For all the bravura handling of style and structure in Mitchell's previous novels, it has been possible to read them and not care too much about the protagonists. Jason Taylor changes all of that. At the start of the book he is still a child, and he has a child's imaginings, easily funnelling into fantasy: the ice on the village pond definitely concealed the bodies of drowned boys, the house deep in the nearby woods was almost certainly inhabited by a witch, the gypsies down the lane could have wandered in from any Rupert Bear story. By the end of the book, all these fancies will have shrunk away: the witch in the woods will have transmuted into an old lady suffering from Alzheimer's, the woods themselves will have stopped seeming impenetrable and become "three footy pitches tops".

And yes, that story's been told before, that shrinkage from childhood fantasy into a world recognisable to adults, that slippage from believing in, and trying to find, a magic tunnel through the Malvern Hills to understanding, and trying to cope with such more tiresomely complicated things as parental unhappiness and, ultimately, divorce. But Mitchell, in narrowing the scale of his canvas, has dramatically increased its depth.

Hangman plays a major part in this, working effectively on two levels. On the first, more obvious one, it's Mitchell's own experience, and he draws deeply on it: the classroom angst of being unable to give the right answer to a teacher because it would start with a particular consonant, the playground fear of being taunted, relegated to that lowliest of all categories, those sufficiently different to be bullied; all this is brilliantly conveyed.

"Outwardly, having a stammer didn't affect me much because I avoided situations in which it could embarrass me," says Mitchell. "Inwardly it affected me a heck of a lot, because you have to have these complex software programmes in place in your speech circuit to navigate your way round words you fear you might not be able to say. It's the fact that it's so random that makes it all the more unsettling. For example, I've always been scared of public speaking, and I've never been as terrified in my life as the first time I gave a public reading, with AS Byatt in London. In the end, I was fine - but where's the logic in that?"

Having a stammer, Mitchell insists, had no direct bearing on being a writer. "A lot of people think that finding you way round a word gives you that extra vocabulary, or that you might write because you can be more articulate that way," he says. "It doesn't work like that." Perhaps, but as he also says that his creativity comes from setting obstacles and then finding a way around them, it's hard not to think that there's some deeply buried link. And even if there isn't, the fact remains that Hangman is also a perfect metaphor for a teenager's bewildering attempt to find a way into the grown-ups' world, sometimes able to find the right way to make them understand, and sometimes, unaccountably, and with no apparent logic, failing to do so.

IF REMEMBERING HIS 13-YEAR-OLD SELF WAS PART of the challenge for Black Swan Green, so was a detailed recreating of the early 1980s. "I wanted to make it as specific as possible, not just about the visceral thrill of the Falklands but how it was perceived by a boy in that particular part of south Worcestershire, the kind of language they'd use and so on," says Mitchell.

"I did some of my research by being a Friends Reunited lurker, and I did a bit in the British Library's newspaper archives at Colindale. A good tip from David Peace [the novelist whose novels are all set in the early 1980s] is that if you want to understand a historical period, the best place to start is in the classified ads."

For all his novels, Mitchell writes up his research notes in a series of moleskin notebooks. He has two for Black Swan Green, neatly arranged under a variety of headings such as "Juvenile slang", "Romany vocabulary", "Fashion" and "Dialogue awaiting use".

He should, I suggest, read them to audiences, for here is the very sharpest distillation of the decade's social history: "Blakeys (those metal bits attached to heels that made sparks on the ground); KP Disco crisps; calling gays 'bennys'; Dillinger trousers, which were baggy up top and narrow at the hem and were coolest with a matt sheen; the end of Adam Ant's Stand and Deliver dance where you crossed your arms in front of you; the memory of biology labs that smelt of formaldehyde and floor polish; how you'd say 'who opened the bag of ham?' for 'who farted?; Demon Racers hired out at lunchtime; TVs rented, not bought; donkey jackets; a Toshiba personal hi-fi with a radio in it the shape of a cassette; the Royal Wedding; grundies - which were the same as wedgies - which were when a group of boys picked you up by your underpants."

Yet Black Swan Green is no mere nostalgia-fest. Although there are moments of hilarious social comedy, not least with the visits of his ghastly Uncle Brian and his haut bourgeois brood, this is a novel that perfectly captures the terrors and the shrill thrills of being a 13-year-old growing up at a time when Britain is fighting a far-away war (and, Jason suspects, about to face a far more apocalyptic one with the Soviet Union).

Mitchell hasn't completely given up on literary game-playing (the woman who critiques Jason's poems comes straight out of Cloud Atlas), but this book doesn't need to tunnel into any other stories. It is complete, and completely believable, in its own right, and even in the background scenes uses language with compelling precision and verve. I do hope to read a better British novel this year, but I can't honestly say that I expect to.

• Black Swan Green by David Mitchell is published by Sceptre, priced 16.99.