“Based on what you telt us, Mrs Hamil –, sorry, Ms Buchanan, we wanted to see what . . .” The polis looked at his pad. “Mun-go?” He shook his head in pity at a name destined to get belted in any playground. “. . . what young Mungo might know about it?”
As a followup to the Man Booker-winning Shuggie Bain, I think it’s fair to acknowledge that Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo treads very similar territory — a sensitive young Glaswegian lad is coming of age in a time and place of casual violence and toxic masculinity, raised by an alcoholic single mother whom he can’t help but love and care for — but while Shuggie’s story was mostly one of a childhood lost, Mungo’s is a tale of exploring one’s sexuality and discovering self. With a plot unspooled in alternating timelines — what events led to Mungo being sent off on a camping trip with a pair of questionable male role models and what happens on that trip — there is a fair amount of tension, if no real shockers (and perhaps some strained credibility), but Young Mungo shines more in the specifics than in the overall picture; and shine it does. Stuart has, once again, created some really fine and believable characters, and in this world of hurt, I rooted for them. Rounding up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Mo-Maw didn’t like her children to call her Mammy, nor Mother, and never just Maw. She said she was too young for that shite. She had just turned fifteen when she came down with Hamish and was only nineteen when Mungo was born. They all came out so close together, they might have been arm-in-arm. Mungo was the only one who hadn’t burst forth singing. The other two came out raging, fists clenched and faces blue, but Mungo had just looked up at her in a sad way, she had said, like he was already expecting her to be a great disappointment.
Mungo Hamilton, the schemie wee bam, is nearly sixteen, suffers from tics and weird self-soothing behaviours, is a poor student (but can’t quit school until his next birthday without getting the School Board after his Mammy), and if it wasn’t for his saintly older sister Jodie taking care of him, Mungo wouldn’t know affection at all. Mo-Maw (never refer to her as anyone’s mother in public) is absent for long stretches at a time, and when she is around, she’s often too drunk and always too self-centered to take proper care of her children. Mungo’s brother Hamish — known as Ha-Ha to the gang he leads — is a violent thug, but ever since he got his fifteen-year-old girlfriend pregnant, he finds himself with less time to devote to making a man out of his little brother. Living in a housing scheme in Glasgow’s East End, Mungo interacts with a colourful cast of supporting characters — mostly people suffering unemployment and still blaming Margaret Thatcher for it a couple years after her resignation — but Mungo’s basic loneliness just might be alleviated through his new friendship with a boy in the next building over. Does it really matter if James is a Catholic and Mungo’s brother likes to rumble with the Billy boys against those dirty Fenian bastards?
Jodie had seen the inside of Glasgow Cathedral only once; she had been allowed to go on that particular school trip since she could walk there and it was all free. As the other girls took out their RE notebooks to rub at the stone carvings, Jodie found a stained-glass window of the patron saint, St Kentigern, or as he was colloquially known to Glaswegians, St Mungo. Here St Mungo was depicted as a melancholy boy, cradling a fat salmon, looking sorry that it was dead. Jodie had watched the afternoon light splinter through the saint and cross the dusty cathedral floor and thought of her brother. It was a peaceful window, somehow lonesome. Jodie had sighed before it. It was unlike Mo-Maw to get something so right.
Probably because Mungo is that much older than the character of Shuggie Bain, my heart didn’t ache for the maternal neglect that he was experiencing in the same way, but by focussing on Mungo’s awakening sense of self and sexuality, Stuart made me really care about Mungo in a different way and hope for his happiness against all odds. The second storyline of the camping trip gives a dose of tension to the plot — just what happens to get Mungo banished like this? — but again, it was the richly drawn Glasgow setting and the characters themselves that most earned my interest. The following is an interaction with the sweet old lady from downstairs:
“Mungo Hamilton, ye’re a useless wee scunner.” The letter box closed with a snap. Mungo sat up. There was a brief pause before it rasped open . “But I love ye.” It snapped closed, and then sprung open again. “Ya wee arsehole.”
I’ve noted recently that I can be a pretty cynical reader, resisting narratives designed to pull at my emotions, but when something feels true, I am open to it and can be affected. Young Mungo feels true — and if that’s because, once again, Douglas Stuart is writing what he knows, then he ought to keep doing that — and it absolutely reached me.
