Like Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart’s Booker-winning 2020 debut, Young Mungo is an evocative coming-of-age narrative centred on the housing estates of Glasgow. It boldly addresses the hostilities of a post-industrial, post-Thatcherite Scotland, through which working-class boys must somehow find a path towards manhood.
Like Shuggie Bain’s achingly endearing titular character, who becomes the sole carer of his troubled, alcoholic mother, teenager Mungo is a preternaturally sensitive figure. With his distinctive “softness” and unobtrusive way of being, Mungo is presented as ill-equipped to deal with the prevailing machismo and brutality of a haunted cityscape dominated by “tight-packed tenements heavy with a sense of lack and need”.
Throughout Young Mungo, which blossoms into a love story as well as an investigation of urban life, Stuart once again proves himself to be a masterly and humane storyteller, a lyrical translator of Mungo’s jagged experience in this inhospitable context.
While his narcissistic, alcoholic mother largely abandons her three children to raise themselves, and as Mungo’s older brother, Hamish, deals speed and revels in bloody gang warfare, his older sister Jodie is a protective source of care.
The exchanges between Mungo and Jodie, brimming with intimacy and a doomed mutual hope to escape poverty and abuse, are exquisitely drawn. It is Jodie who questions Mungo’s latent self-loathing, asserts that he is “smarter than he thinks”, encourages him to nurture his artistic talents.
Secondary characters, neighbours in Mungo’s Protestant block, also resist the prevailing mood of flintiness. Mrs Campbell and the ostracised Poor-Wee-Chickie have their own troubles, but they recognise Mungo’s inherent warmth and show him that adulthood need not be defined by dog-eat-dog self-interest.
The profundity of Stuart’s exceptional writing comes, then, partly from his commitment to the truth that even amid deprivation, compassion persists. This is most fully and beautifully expressed in the relationship between Mungo and his fellow lonely adolescent Catholic James.
They unexpectedly meet in “a forgotten place behind the tenements… a sliver of unclaimed grass, a purgatory forty feet wide”, where Mungo sometimes goes in search of rare stillness and quiet, and where James has decided to construct a makeshift dovecot.
Their connection begins with Mungo’s quiet curiosity about James’s pigeon fancying but gently grows into something much deeper that defies the staunchly maintained sectarian divisions marking the world around them.
In his rendering of their dreamy pillow talk, Stuart’s attention to the bodily is poignant and represents some of the novel’s finest writing. “The first time Mungo saw James naked, the closeness made it hard to take it all in,” he writes.
“Mungo wanted to push him away, pin him on the floor, stand over him, and just simply look. But they twisted together, brow to brow, mouth on mouth, and everything was like peeping through a crack in the door: an eyeful of alabaster and rose, the glacial blue of inner arms with their veins like violet rivers.”
The novel traverses this luminous romantic storyline and another concerning an unsettling fishing expedition that Mungo goes on at his mother’s behest. As the external threats to the delicate love between these boys mount, we come to realise that Stuart’s focus on and elevation of the corporeal is much more than aesthetic. This is a novel that is uncompromisingly concerned with the fragility, vulnerability and exploitation of othered bodies.
Poignant and soulful, this is a substantial work of art that is just as full of feeling and as meticulously crafted as Shuggie Bain. It is no exaggeration to say that I read the final pages through floods of breathless tears.
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart is published by Picador at £16.99
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