It is probably a universal experience of anyone who has gone away to college, that when they return to their parental home, they come back a subtly changed person. Everyone may treat you as though you are exactly the same person who left. Families feel like they know the truth of you, and are often reluctant to update their perceptions. The experience of leaving, and learning who you are whilst you were away from home, from parental supervision, and the framing context of your upbringing, adjust you and your outlook on your life, both past and present. The dynamics of relationships at home, may feel familiar, but not necessarily comforting. It can feel like you are returning to a way of being you no longer wish to inhabit. This disjuncture can be hard to live with. And the story, as told here by Douglas Stuart in John of John, captures that state of returning to a situation where you feel instantly trapped. Finding yourself rebelling in major or petty ways, against the reasserting of old constraints. Here, the desire to leave almost overwhelms it's central character Cal from the very moment they arrive back on the island of Harris.
For Cal, has been away to Art College to study fashion. He's attained his degree, but not his fully adult independence. He's been sofa hopping and living off the kindness of friends for months. His future career has yet to take off. A lack of perceived inaction or ambition, hence makes Cal reluctant yet, to return to the island of Harris and to Falabay. He phones home every week to speak to his Father. They talk little about what he is actually doing. It's more like a Bible class, a religious instruction, in order that Cal does not stray from the straight and narrow of his Father John's faith.
Cal is gay, but cannot even contemplate telling his father, because the consequences, well, they don't bear thinking of. For John, has a deep well of frustration and anger within him, which is horrible for everyone when it erupts. It's origins Cal frequently misdiagnoses. He has never understood why, when Cal was only ten, John seperated from Grace, Cal's Mother. Something went wrong in their relationship. Cal's Mother largely takes the blame, just because it was her that left. Though this is clearly not the whole story. There is hidden knowledge here, and it is not getting any better for being kept so secret. John indicates in one phone call to Cal, that his Grandmother Ella does not appear well to him, and this convinces Cal this is the time when he should return to the island and people of his birthplace.
Stuart describes island life, in evocative small details, the colours and sensory qualities of the landscape, the air, the sea, it's deceptive but cruel beauty. There are sensitively aesthetic descriptions of the process of choosing the mix of colours when weaving tweed cloth. Falabay appears to uphold ancient traditions and conventions, if judged by the externals alone. Though in a small intimate population where everyone knows everyone else's busines, keeping secrets you don't want other folk to know, means maintaining a stern stoney unknowable exterior. Island inhabitants always have something tucked away, they've never told anyone. The island economy runs on sheep farming, the weaving of tweed cloth and increasingly tourism. The latter is gradually changing the island and it's people, from a community into a commodity. The old traditions and beliefs of the islanders, though they are desperately clung onto, are teetering on the edge of becoming uneconomic to maintain.
In the dwindling faithful of a church congregation, there is a clear demarcation between those who have taken Christ into their life, and those who have not. Everyone knows which side of that line they are currently standing on. The Minister's gentle soft voice might seem benevolent in its intent, but his level of control over his congregation is coercive and invades the privacy of islanders inner lives. And beneath their subservience to the word of God, many of the island men inhabit conflicted and unfulfilled existences of disquieting loneliness. Some of them may indeed be gay, but no-one takes the risk of stepping outside the perceived shadow of shame and exile.
The feeling woven through this novel, is of an over hanging weight of despair and sadness. Of people struggling with unfulfilled lives, self betrayal and guilt. Of men trying, but often failing, to enforce a firm level of control over their inner lives, desires and impulses. And the sense is that so easily, and quite soon, the lid could blow off all these scrupulously maintained stand offs between what men say and don't say, what they feel they are, and what they actually publicly do. All of it buried under unchallenged moral expectations of them.
The feeling that something personally tragic is being revealed to you here, makes this novel often a heartbreaking story to read. I found I had to space out my reading as I got nearer the end, just in case I couldn't bare where the story was heading. It is that good. Stuart slowly and almost imperceptibly feeds you snippets of information that lead or mislead you into thinking you know where the characters may be headed, and then it doesn't go there, but to somewhere else close by. Will exposing the truth, clear the air, or resolve anything here? Or is there bound to be a dark peaty clod of brutal tragedy discovered in some ditch or on the harbour foreshore, somewhere on this island?
The Booker Prize winner, Shuggie Bain was like watching a slow motion car crash happen. His second novel, Young Mungo', felt a bit heavy handed and overly contrived in its evocation of grooming and abuse. John of John, takes you far away from Stuart's lived experience of working class life in Glasgow, to a much older geographically isolated rural culture on the Scottish islands. Its written with descriptive and emotional fluency, peppered with flashes of quite subtle perceptive brilliance. However reprehensibly some of these people may behave at times, you still appreciate, love and have some feeling of care for these people. So much is so gently inferred here, of truths understated, briefly mentioned casually in passing, rather than double underlined. It is a superb evocation of the nature of a people, landscape and the predicaments of an island existence.
I was left hugely moved and often impressed with the depths this novel was prepared to go to. John of John, is Douglas Stuart's best novel yet. It haunted me, and held me in a state of tension, even whilst I was reading it, and lives on vividly in my mind still. It will be hard to find another novel published this year, to beat this one.
CARROT REVIEW - 8/8
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