Teen boys fall in love amid violence
Douglas Stuart’s exhilarating, heartbreaking follow-up to his Booker Prize-winning novel “Shuggie Bain” eloquently reminds us of the disastrous consequences of ignorance and intolerance.
Set in the 1980s in a grim working-class neighborhood of Glasgow, “Young Mungo” is a love story about two teenage boys — one Protestant, one Catholic. But it’s also a gut-wrenching story of survival, about how delicate things can bloom in a hard place, then all too easily be snuffed out.
At 15, Mungo has survived a childhood full of disappointment and neglect with fewer wounds than you might expect: He is not yet broken. He still loves his alcoholic mother, who has disappeared with a new man (his older sister Jodie, on the verge of university and escape, has given up on her). Still, the shadows that loom over Mungo — poverty, lack of opportunity, his violent older brother Hamish, a curious lack of interest in girls when most of his contemporaries are busily impregnating them — have not yet managed to dim his inner light.
Still, Mungo understands he’s different. He’s not fragile, but he’s increasingly unwilling to join Hamish’s gang as they pursue their nightly activities (theft, drug sales, destruction of both property and Catholics). Then Mungo meets James, a Catholic boy who tends a rooftop dovecote, and suddenly a light winks on in his bleak existence.
Stuart reels out two story lines with equal attention to detail and emotion. In one, Mungo and James embark on a tentative friendship. In the other, set a few months later, Mungo’s mother has sent her son off for a weekend of camping in the wilderness with two men
she barely knows. Stuart wrings immense tension from both story lines, infusing the novel with an edgy, relentless urgency.
The language is gorgeous, poetic, expertly evoking the dour streets of Glasgow and its people.
Every secondary character is well-defined enough to carry his or her own novel, from Hamish and Jodie to James. Stuart shows us so much ugliness, but he offers a promise of hope, too. This book will hurt your heart, so reach for that hope. Sometimes it’s all we can do. — Connie Ogle, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Like Peter Rock’s 10 previous works of fiction,
his new novel mixes characters who live on the margins of society with those in the mainstream. “Passersthrough,” despite its promising beginning, evolves into a bizarre, otherworldly environment that never clearly seems resolved. “Passersthrough” starts with an audio capture transcription between California woman Helen Hanson, 36, and her estranged father, Benjamin, 76, who lives in Oregon. Helen’s mother died a few months earlier and among her effects, Helen found 11 birthday cards addressed
to Helen from her father. This discovery led her to reestablish a relationship with her father that fell apart 25 years earlier after they went camping together near Mt. Rainier.
During that camping excursion, we learn that 11-year-old Helen went missing for almost a week before being discovered at a cabin more than 100 miles from where her father reported her missing. Although there was no evidence of foul play, Helen moved in with her mother as her parents had separated shortly before this incident, likely because of another family trauma: the death of Helen’s younger brother a year earlier.
What follows could be an explanation of what happened between Benjamin and his daughter those many years ago, but it’s uncertain. In the end the reader doesn’t have any clearer idea than Benjamin did about what happened to his children more than two decades earlier. And perhaps that is what Rock wants. Uncertainties and mysteries always surround death and disappearances. And while we may hope we find answers in stories, and in life, that’s not always what happens.