Book review: Young Mungo, Douglas Stuart

Young Mungo doesn’t have an easy life. On the book jacket, Douglas Stuart’s novel is described by The Observer’s critic as ‘A gay Romeo and Juliet set in the brutal world of Glasgow’s housing estates.’ And while Mungo’s teenage romance across the sectarian divide does tug at the heartstrings, it’s the brutality of the world he inhabits that will stay with me.

Douglas Stuart’s first novel Shuggie Bain earned him the Booker Prize. I haven’t read it, but talking to others in my book club who have, it’s set in a similar time and place to his follow-up novel, Young Mungo. And given that Stuart grew up in Glasgow’s east end tenements, it’s a world he knows and understands very well.

I guess that lived experience is what gives the writing in Young Mungo its visceral quality. Deep, raw emotions are continually displayed. And Stuart pulls no punches in his descriptions of some truly awful events that Mungo Hamilton endures. But he also conveys a depth of love and affection that exists between Mungo’s family members, despite that family being about as dysfunctional as it gets.

In theory, the head of the home is Young Mungo’s mother, Mo-Maw. But Mo-Maw is a raging alcoholic who had three kids by the time she was 20 and is frequently missing from the family home. Even though Mungo continues to idolise her, she’ll be winning no prizes for mother of the year. More ably filling the maternal role is Mungo’s older sister Jodie. The airing cupboard is often their haven for comfort and sharing confidences.

The eldest sibling is Hamish, also known as Ha-Ha and the leader of a gang of Protestant thugs who get their kicks from kicking the local Catholics. When Young Mungo meets James, a slightly older teen who has already accepted his sexuality, you know it won’t be an easy romance because James is a Catholic. At times, it’s hard to tell which would be the worst news for Ha-Ha. That his brother is gay or dating a Catholic.

While the family’s awful living situation and the teen romance take up the biggest chunk of the story, it starts in a different time and place. That time is a few months in the future, when Mo-Maw has packed Mungo off on a fishing trip to a distant loch with two male ‘friends’ from the AA group she attends. Foreboding and menace emanate from the start. Every time the book returns to that timeline, you dread what might happen. And what does happen is far worse than you imagined.

So, as I said at the start and despite his tender age, Young Mungo does not have an easy life, and his story is not an easy read. But it feels like a very real one. The writing is so good that you are, perhaps unwillingly, drawn into Mungo’s world. It’s a world I have no experience of, and I often found it difficult to digest. But at the same time, I couldn’t look away. And there is some levity along the way, as well as some colourful side characters like Mungo’s neighbour ‘Poor-Wee-Chickie’.

In my book club, it sparked a broad range of reactions, from a couple of people who loved it to another who almost stopped reading it. For me, I’m not sorry I read it. But I won’t be reading Shuggie Bain or the next novel that Stuart is due to publish in May. I feel richer for knowing more about a world that is totally alien to my own, but it’s not one I want to revisit.

As with many of the books I read, I borrowed Young Mungo from my local library, but it’s also available from bookshops, including the charity Oxfam, which is Europe’s biggest retailer of second-hand books. For more book reviews, visit the Books section of my blog.