The gripping yet tragic fatalism of Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain, felt like watching a car crash happen in slow motion. This was the result of ten years of effort in the writing. During which Stuart honed his style and chosen subject matter. Young Mungo, his second novel appears to have been rushed out quite fast on the heals of its Booker Prize winning predecessor. That he has chosen to stay writing about the working class environs of Glasgow for his follow up novel, is hence understandable. Stick with what you know, for now.
Young Mungo, however, does have many recognisably similar characters - a drunken neglectful Mother - a sister who no longer cares about her Mother, who just wants to get out of this hell hole - the kindly attentive Mother loving son. But more palpably in the air here, is a harsher and more brutish masculine presence. Shuggie was a young naive boy. Mungo is older, a young teenager getting to know who he is and wants to be. Mungo's Father is dead, or at least vanished long ago. His Mother is conveniently unclear. His elder brother Hamish, is a cruel domineering presence, really nothing more than a street thug with his own gang. The two men who his Mother lets take Mungo on a fishing trip to 'make him a man', turn out to be convicted child abusers. All the usual male role models are either absent or not admirable ones. Having any sort of gay relationship in this working class society, will be impossible.
Throughout the book, the oppressive constriction of this tightly defined masculinity, bares down upon Mungo, for him to conform to its expectations. Mungo, on the cusp of manhood, is beginning to understand not just that his sexual orientation is different, but also not acceptable here. Not only to his family, but to the surrounding working class culture. In the same tenement block lives the elderly gay man Chickie Calhoun, who is tolerated but generally never befriended. Everyone treats him as though he's a pedophile, best stayed away from. He's an example of what can happen to a gay man who stays on home turf, out of devoted loyalty to his family and background.
Young Mungo has two timelines running through it. One, which is sequential in time following Mungo's growing self maturity and fragile confidence in his true nature and future. Interspersed at regular intervals is the unfolding details of this one horrific camping trip where Mungo is repeatedly abused by Gallowgate and St Christopher'. Until the final few chapters of the novel, you have no idea how this gruesome weekend fits into the sequential time frame. I think that this structural disjuncture does not, in the end, serve the novel well. It fractures not just the overall mood, but also your emotional attention. Feeling less compelling to read as a consequence.
Stuart writes touchingly, but also with a gritty truthfulness about Mungo and James growing affection for each other. Each trying elaborate means to disguise to their families what is really going on. Everything furtive, emotionally exploratory and secret. There is petulance and jealousy too, born out of their own insecurity.
He avoids writing that clear cut happy ending, the contrived resolution, that perhaps we might all wish or hope for them. Instead, Mungo realises that he has to grasp the opportunity of a life with James, to get as far away from both home and harm as he can. Whether he will be able to, or allowed to, is left open. This is only one slim possible outcome.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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