Once the two young men know what they feel for each other, two plots begin to unfold in the course of the book: they explore those feelings, and everybody around them attacks those feelings. He could be either a boy or a man, depending on how he turned, or how the light caught him.”
This is every bit as eloquent and fiercely miserable novel as Shuggie Bain – in fact, it may be a hair stronger on both counts, since the brutality in its pages is both more believable and more savage and the thread of its hope is thinner and weaker (not hope for those birds in the dovecote, obviously – they’re as doomed as a cocky jock in a horror movie – but any adult reader will know that by ).Īs mentioned, the story revolves around the illicit passion that comes to life between David “Mungo” Hamilton and James Jamieson, with whom Young Mungo falls in love almost immediately, after a first impression of telling ambiguity: “From a distance, between his gangly long arms and his skillful hands, there was conflict about him. Instead, Douglas Stuart’s second novel verifies the presence of a major new fictional voice in the literary chorus. Young Mungo not only dispels this second looming specter but sees it off with almost prodigal ease. From that, it could be easily extrapolated that Douglas Stuart’s second novel would be a morose, petulant little disappointment for even his most ardent fans. In a mean and predictable arithmetic, the brighter the debut the darker the sophomore slump, and debuts in our modern post-literate era don’t get much brighter than Shuggie Bain. The dreaded novelistic “sophomore slump” is a cliche and yet very real, a predictable doldrum in which a second book is quickly cobbled together from notes or haphazardly assembled from some rightfully-forgotten hank of juvenilia in a bottom desk drawer in order to meet a contractual obligation. Mungo and James take to meeting at the dovecote where James keeps his pigeons, located on a lightly wooded, forgotten patch behind the tenements, “a purgatory only forty feet wide.” And since their own inner natures are stronger than the societal prejudices of all their elders, tragedy and need soon enough prompt them purgatorial exploration – hence the hostile specter: discovery would mean catastrophe.īut that isn’t the only or even the most prominent specter hanging over Young Mungo, as all the many thousands of readers of Stuart’s debut Shuggie Bain will particularly be able to attest.
James and Mungo, the young teens growing up in a bleak, hardscrabble public housing estate in Glasgow in Douglas Stuart’s new book, Young Mungo, live under an ominous specter: in their time and culture (among other things, Mungo’s older brother is a violent gang leader with an image to uphold), two boys falling in love with each other is functionally impossible, certain to call down wrath from all quarters.
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