Douglas Stuart’s sophomore novel, Young Mungo, returns to the tenements of Glasgow that he so gorgeously rendered in his Booker-prize winning debut Shuggie Bain. This time, he traces the story of Mungo, a young boy who is basically being raised by his sixteen year old sister Jodie, while their alcoholic mother seeks adventure outside of the home, and their oldest brother Hamish terrorizes the community with his band of Protestant agitators who run the local drug trade and beat up Catholic boys from across the river. Like Shuggie, Mungo lives a life of instability and repression: he is forced to be a caretaker for his wayward mother, who blames her children for her poverty, he watches his sixteen year old sister become a woman before her time, and his brother enforces a masculine code of honor that prioritizes violence and discourages softness. Mungo is totally adrift in the world when he meets Jamie, a boy his age who lives across the street and breeds pigeons. Jamie is a quiet boy, and his and Mungo’s friendship quickly blossoms, but there’s just one problem: James is Catholic and Mungo is Protestant, and their fractured community make their fraternizing dangerous.
The novel is told in two timelines that eventually meet, the first being the recent past, where James and Mungo meet and fall in love, and the second strand in the present, where Mungo is sent on a fishing trip on his own with two alcoholics for a weekend. As the novel alternates between the two timelines, it becomes clear that Mungo has been sent on this fishing weekend as a sort of punishment for what is happening with James—the trip is framed as a sort of masculine getaway where Mungo can learn to be a real man, taught by two men who only a deeply irresponsible mother could trust to watch her child. As the friendship between James and Mungo grows into something more like romance, so to rises the threat of violence. James and Mungo live in a deeply patriarchal community where romance between men is not only frowned upon, but met with threats of violence and death. As Mungo begins coming to terms with his identity and desire, he increasingly sees James as the only escape from his dreary existence, and the two plan to run away and forge a life together away from the religious conflict that surrounds them. Both boys have absent mothers, Mungo’s only comes home to recover from benders, and James’ passed away in his youth, but also absent fathers, Mungo’s is dead while’s James’ is usually at sea. So the boys become the only constants in each other’s lives, life rafts of intimacy and compassion to hold onto in a sea of uncertainty.
With a tenderness reminiscent of Shuggie Bain, Stuart traces a portrait of a young man who is constantly yearning for motherly love and affection, a gentle young man who is forced to take care of his withholding alcoholic mother. While Jodie is more weary of their mother, tired of her inconsistent care-taking and narcissism, Mungo seems to have boundless reserves of compassion for his mother, whom he adores despite her constant betrayals. Everyone in Mungo’s family believes that his gentle and almost feminine manner is a result of his father’s untimely death, and believes that he needs to learn how to truly become a man by having relations with women and getting involved with his brother’s gang. Mungo’s sexuality goes unsaid because it is simply to dangerous to even conceive of—making things all the more tense when they discover that his friendship with the Catholic boy across the street may be more than just a friendship.
The novel is imbued with a constant foreboding that violence could ensue at any moment, this sense that things are hurtling towards chaos constantly. This tension is what makes the relationship between Mungo and James all the more moving, the two boys have found away to carve out their own peace and make space for self-discovery. Stuart so specifically conjures the Glasgow that the characters inhabit—a community fractured by religious and cultural violence, and mired in poverty brought by the elimination of skilled labor jobs that families had depended upon for decades in Scotland. This specific brutality contrasts so starkly with the tenderness of the romance at the novel’s center, which is the sort of perfect teen love that will remind readers of the purity of first love. Stuart has cemented himself as a master chronicler of coming-of-age queer narratives, and his characters leap off the pages and pull the reader right into working class Scotland. While this novel bears some similarities to Shuggie, Stuart has proven with Young Mungo that his early success is no fluke—he is one of the most unique and exciting literary talents working today.