In 2020 Douglas Stuart shot to fame with his debut novel Shuggie Bain (2020), winner of the Booker Prize. Many authors struggle to write their second novel, and the stakes were particularly high for Stuart following the critical and commercial success of Shuggie Bain, which has sold over a million copies. His second novel, Young Mungo (2022), was released earlier this year and I am so pleased that Stuart has crafted a brilliant, engrossing novel with heartbreaking, memorable characters.
Shuggie Bain told the story of an alcoholic single mother trying to raise her family in 1980s Glasgow. While her older children leave the home, her youngest son Shuggie stays.
Young Mungo follows a familiar path, featuring a similar family in 1990s Glasgow, but instead the focus is on the teenage son.
Mungo Hamilton is a fifteen year old boy with a kind heart. He never knew his father but is deeply devoted to his mother Maureen, called Mo-Maw. Unfortunately Mo-Maw is not maternal, resenting that she has wasted her best years on her three weans. She routinely drinks herself into a state where she disappears for days on end, shacking up with some man, and then returning to wreck havoc on the family. Mungo's closest ally is his clever older sister Jodie. She has effectively raised Mungo and is desperate to escape this life by going to university and make something of herself.
The poor family live in a housing commission scheme in which there is sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholics. The Hamiltons are Protestant and Hamish's older brother Hamish (or Ha-Ha) is a wee gangster - a hard man leading a youth gang to steal, fight and run from the polis. Hamish terrorises everyone around him and he seeks to recruit sensitive Mungo and toughen him up, to bolster Ha-Ha's reputation and his gang numbers.
From the outset we know that something bad is going to happen in this family. We first meet Mungo as he is being shipped off by his mother on a camping trip with two older men - Gallowgate and 'Saint' Christopher - presumably hoping they will teach him some life skills and be a father figure to the boy. The novel shifts back and forth from Mungo's life in Glasgow and what transpires on this trip. Overtime we learn more about these two men, how Mungo ended up with them, and how Mungo is changed as a result of this experience. These chapters are tense and dark - a deep foreboding creeps over the reader each time we are taken from Glasgow to the loch. While life in Glasgow is also hard, at least we know that Mungo is safer here than in isolation at the campsite.
Some months before the camping trip, Mungo befriended sixteen year old James Jameson, a Catholic boy who also lives in the tenements. His mother has died and his father is largely absent, working on an offshore rig. James takes comfort in his pigeons, spending most of his time in his doocot nurturing these birds. The boys become friends and over time they realise the extent of their feelings for one another. But it is not safe in this place or at this time to be gay. Mungo and James have to hide their love, plus with the sectarian violence all around them, these star-crossed lovers should not even be friends. They make plans to run away together as soon as Mungo turns sixteen.
Stuart covers complex themes, writing about toxic masculinity, sexuality, violence, addiction, poverty, politics in a confronting but compelling way. The blossoming romance is told with such empathy and in severe contrast to the brutal violence elsewhere in the novel. Some readers may be put off by the subject matter, but I would encourage people to persevere. I absolutely loved
Young Mungo and to enhance my experience of the novel, I read while listening to the audiobook narrated by Scottish actor Chris Reilly.
Special thanks to my mum who gave me
Young Mungo. I really enjoyed this story and these wonderfully written characters will stay with me for a very long time.
