Book Review: "Young Mungo"

Douglas Stuart's sophomore novel is a haunting and brutally beautiful tale of young queer love finding a way to flourish amid the ugliness of a postindustrial Glasgow.

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Warning: Spoilers for the novel follow.

I remember the first time that I saw Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo sitting on a bookshelf. I was visiting the Scottish Parliament, and I saw the book proudly displayed in the bookshop. At the time, I thought to myself how wonderful it was to see a queer book–with two boys making out on the front cover, no less!--proudly displayed in a government building. More to the point, there was something so raw and compelling about the cover that I very nearly bought it there and then. However, it wouldn’t be until my boyfriend bought a copy of it during his recent sojourn in Edinburgh and brought it home to me that I would finally have my chance to sink my teeth into this haunting, beautiful, and unflinching novel. 

When the story begins Mungo Hamilton, a young Protestant boy, has been sent off on a fishing trip with two strangers by his mother, in the hopes that spending time with the men will make him into a real man. What follows is a harrowing experience for Mungo, one which ends in sexual violence and murder. While all of this is taking place in the diegetic presence, the book flips back into time, narrating the series of events that brought Mungo to this pass, in particular his teenage romance with James, a Catholic boy who lives in the same tenement. 

There’s something hauntingly brutal about Stuart’s prose. From the very first pages he immerses us as readers in the bleak tenements of Glasgow in the 1990s, a city struggling from the Thatcher regime and its gutting of Scottish industry. Within the Hamilton household, meanwhile, there is also an all-too-familiar form of rot. Mungo’s mother remains mired in alcoholism, and in addition to desperately seeking a man to satisfy her romantic yearnings she also has a bad habit of leaving her children to fend for themselves. Mungo’s two siblings have taken very different paths. While elder sister Jodie tries to do well in school (even while engaging in a troubling relationship with a teacher) so that she can find a way out of this life of poverty, older brother Hamish has become the leader of a gang of Protestant boys. 

Stuart is remarkably adept at creating a sense of place and time. Even if I had never been to Glasgow, reading Young Mungo I would have felt that I’d been there on those grimy streets, wandering with Mungo and his mother from one place to another, even to the old Glasgow Necropolis. Through Mungo’s eyes we see the way that the politics of London have rendered this once-mighty industrial city into a hollowed-out shell of its former self, a place in which old man abandon themselves to drink and young men get girls pregnant and engage in violent acts in an effort to give their life some sense of meaning and feeling. All of this often feels like a heavy weight for Mungo and the reader.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t bright spots in Mungo’s life. His sister Jodie is an obvious source of support, and their bond is one of the things that gives him some measure of stability. Poor-Wee-Chickie, an older gay man who lives in the tenements is likewise a little oasis of kindness in a world marked by the opposite. He is scorned as being nothing more than a pervert and a poofter, but he shows Mungo kindness and, as it turns out, is one of those who gives him a compassionate ear and understands why it is that he feels out of place in the tenements. More importantly, he also shares with Mungo his own experiences as a young gay man, and his life of unfulfilled desire–he turned away a chance to run away to Australia with the love of his life in order to care for his mother–is a cautionary tale for his young counterpart. 

The other bright spot, of course, is James, and the romance that emerges between these two teens is awkward and tentative at first. Both of them have endured more than their fair share of parental and familial trauma–James’ mother died, his father spends most of the year working on a rig, and he holds his son and his sexuality in contempt–but somehow they manage to create a little island of joy and happiness, one that is made all the more poignant by its short duration. From the moment they meet it’s clear that there’s something special between them, even as both we (and they) realize that, like so many other star-crossed-lovers of fiction, they’re going to have to endure unspeakable tragedy if they want to build a life together. 

For all that they work so assiduously to cultivate their own little isle of beauty amid a world riddled with violence and ugliness, neither James nor Mungo can ever quite escape their own milieu. We’re always aware that something or someone–whether Hamish or James’s father or just the homophobic environment in which they live–will destroy what they have. Indeed, so deep is Mungo’s mother’s aversion to the revelation that her son might be queer that she sends him away with two men she barely knows, not realizing that they have in fact been in prison for child molestation.

Most of the novel is told from Mungo’s point of view, but there are brief excursions to other characters, including Mungo’s sister Jodie and even James himself. Jodie is a fascinating individual in her own right, for while she clearly loves her brother she also can’t quite accept him for who he is and is in her own way just as cruel as Hamish. Of all the characters, only James and Chickee seem capable or willing to see Mungo and love him unequivocally.

Despite the sometimes-overwhelming gloom and despair that hangs over the novel like a miasma, there is at least some measure of hope for our young lovers, and the novel ends by holding out the possibility that they might be able to run off and build a life together after all. As Mungo walks toward James, one can sense and feel an entire new future opening up for the two of them, one that is hopefully shorn of the brutality that has poisoned their lives and their happiness. Perhaps their future might be queer, after all.