A tender beauty: Andrew Whitehead reviews Douglas Stuart’s ‘Young Mungo’ 

Douglas Stuart’s follow-up to the Booker-winning Shuggie Bain immerses us in the ‘wrong side’ of Scotland’s biggest city

The bleakest novels are sometimes the most life affirming. Mungo Hamilton — the central character in Douglas Stuart’s new novel — is a teenager growing up in the bleak, forgotten tenements of Glasgow’s East End, where hate is even more deeply embedded than poverty and local status comes from cracking skulls or dealing speed. Sex is either violent or transactional, sometimes both; teachers are predatory; Alcoholics Anonymous gets a bigger attendance than anything but an ‘Old Firm’ — Celtic v Rangers, Catholic v Protestant — football match; and the ‘polis’ in their patrol cars (Stuart uses a sprinkling of Glaswegian street argot) are the enemy.

Amid the cracks in this concrete and granite wilderness, some shrivelled saplings manage against the odds to take seed: a sister’s love for her vulnerable brother; a boy’s love for his drink-sodden mother; another boy’s love for his ‘doos’, his racing pigeons; and the two boys’ transgressive love for each other. Transgressive because gay love brings shame and outcast status; transgressive too because any affection between a Catholic and a Protestant, across the barbed wire borders of religious bigotry, breaks all the tribal rules.

Douglas Stuart grew in up the Glasgow he writes about, the gay son of an alcoholic mother. He’s talked of how he was 17 when he read his first novel and knew little of Glasgow’s more fashionable West End until he was 19. He’s not from a typical literary background and his first novel Shuggie Bain was rejected 44 times before finding a publisher and winning the hugely prestigious Booker Prize. It’s now sold about 15 lakh copies.

Young Mungo is the follow-up novel. And the author has stuck to what is familiar. Both novels feature a young gay man with an alcoholic single mother living on the ‘wrong’ side of Scotland’s biggest city; indeed both these young gay men provide the titles to the novels in which their story is told. That has led to some sharp criticism that Stuart — now living mainly in New York — should break out from his childhood backstreets and extend his repertoire. Perhaps he will in time. But novelists of dinner-party-belt North London don’t get grief for setting one saga of anguish and adultery after another in Hampstead or Highgate or Golders Green, so it hardly seems just to criticise an author for bringing to life an area which is so unexplored by fine writing.

“The observation of the lifestyle and delusions of the chronic alcoholic, and how their addiction addles all around them, is told in particularly immersive fashion”

And the writing is uncommonly fine. Stuart is a wonderful storyteller. He switches deftly and successfully between two timelines — one clearly in the run up to a cathartic event and the other in its aftermath. The observation of the lifestyle and delusions of the chronic alcoholic, and how their addiction addles all around them, is told in particularly immersive fashion. Maureen, or Mo-Maw, transforms — when she is in her cups — into a cruel, unreasoning creature that her children nickname Tatty-Bogle. She gives a little love to them, and to Mungo in particular, but only until the booze runs out, or the next exploitative lover comes along.

Young gay love in a community where the only gay man who doesn’t feel shame is taunted as being a poofter and paedo, is recounted with a tender beauty. It is painful to read, simply because the sense of something really terrible and sinister looming is so overpowering.