Destruction in the Rocks

In the "Rocks" chapter, Jason watches from the sidelines two wars over a pile of rocks, The Falklands War (between Great Britain and Argentina) and the rockery (between Helena and Michael).  By the end of the chapter Jason reflects on how the result of neither war stirs up any joy for him.  When I first read this over I believed that the death of Tom Yew and the open fighting between his parents essentially killed his childhood, marking the point where he changed from a naive boy to a more world weary young man.  To some degree I think this is a proper characterization of how these events changed Jason: he goes from the boy keeping a scrapbook of the war and ranking his parents' fight by a number of stars, to writing the word "bloody" six times in one sentence.

On another level this chapter shows the death of Jason's future, or at least the one he seems to have been planning on.  Ever since the first few pages of Chapter 1, Tom Yew had been the man Jason idealized, his proverbial lighthouse if you will.  He says on page nine that Tom was a minor legend in Black Swan Green, and when he shares his opinion on anything everyone instantly changes theirs to match his.  Jason's first understanding of love and sex is from Tom, albeit accidentally, when Jason's up in the tree watching Tom and Debbie have sex.  Jason always imagines fighting for Britain, shooting down MIGs and refusing medals from Margaret Thatcher, and Tom serves in the Navy and is treated like a hero for it around town.  Jason wants to be Tom Yew in a few years, the cool care free guy who can say anything he wants, both because people won't mock him and he doesn't have to worry about a stammer.  When Tom dies the path Jason was wanting to follow abruptly vanishes, he almost becomes a moving ship without a rudder to keep the theme around sailing going.  This lack of control against the social current is probably a lot of what pushes Jason towards the spooks.  He wants something he can work towards, and he wants to find another Tom Yew, hoping he'll find it as a spook.  The closest guy to Tom in the group would probably be Pluto Noak, but unlike with Tom, Jason seems to realize that Pluto charts a course just a little too far of f normal life routes.