Grisly, violent but gripping

WHILE Douglas Stuart may have revisited and reshuffled many of the elements of his Booker-winning debut Shuggie McBain, bringing a slight sense of diminishing returns to its follow-up, he’s such an enthralling writer that Young Mungo can by no means be called a disappointment.

Its protagonist, Mungo Hamilton, is a 15-year-old boy with facial tics who has grown up in a Glasgow tenement. He’s a gentle soul who has hardly ever been outside his neighbourhood, even as far as the West End. He’s certainly never seen the countryside, which is a revelation to him once he gets there. When we first see him, he’s being reluctantly led away from home by two dodgy characters from his alcoholic mother’s AA group who are taking him, with his mother’s blessing, for a fishing weekend in the country in a bid to toughen the sensitive boy up.

Two parallel storylines set several months apart reveal both what’s in store for him at the lochside – just fear the worst and then double it – and the events which have led up to this point, triggered by Mungo falling in love with a Catholic boy who keeps pigeons. From clues in the text, we can date the story to 1993, but the Glasgow depicted by Stuart reads like a rebuke to the image of regeneration in which Glasgow basked during its City of Culture era. There are no signs of civic rebirth here: it’s a dark place crippled by poverty and shot through with alcoholism, sectarianism, and homophobia.

Sectarian bigotry and toxic masculinity are embodied in Mungo’s older brother, Hamish, a hard-nut who leads a gang of Protestant youths. He’s concerned that Mungo will grow up soft, and pressures him to take a more active part in their activities, which include raiding workyards and battling Catholics. The prospect of Mungo turning out gay, let alone having a Catholic boyfriend, is something he will never accept.

They have a troubled relationship with their mother, known as Mo-Maw, who had her three kids when she was very young and has been left to raise them by herself. An alcoholic, she disappears for days – sometimes weeks – at a time, but Mungo is devoted to her. Mungo’s older sister Jodie, who could have been the central character of a novel herself, has had to grow up quickly. And, as much as she loves Mungo, she resents having to be a parent to him.

All his life, Mungo’s experience of tenderness has always been twinned with harshness, and intimacy always brings with it a sense of danger, a theme Stuart threads expertly throughout the novel. Hamish’s idea of tough love is terrifying, but even Jodie, the most straightforwardly kind and caring to Mungo, can be unexpectedly severe to him.

Stuart is also brilliantly observant of Glasgow and its people, his descriptions instantly coming to life, whether they’re the pin-sharp portraits of the two jailbirds who prey on Mungo, or more general reflections on Glaswegians who rent caravans and “covered the windows with net curtains and filled old car tyres with potting soil and forgetme-nots”.

Paced like a thriller, it’s a grisly, harrowing novel, a worst-case scenario of growing up gay in Glasgow that feels something like an exorcism. The double narratives, almost trying to outpace each other, ensure you’ll be on tenterhooks throughout, alert to signs of impending violence. But its bleakness is undercut by the softer story at its heart, of a boy who longs only to be free to love who he chooses.