A Booker Prize Winner Takes On First Love and — Just Maybe — Hope

YOUNG MUNGO

By Douglas Stuart

When 15-year-old Mungo and his brother Hamish velocity by central Glasgow in a automotive the latter has been paid to steal, the neighborhoods are new to them; they’ve barely traveled past the confines of some slender streets. Like “Shuggie Bain,” Stuart’s 2020 Booker Prize-winning first novel, “Younger Mungo” has a lived-in understanding of the textures of life with an alcoholic dad or mum, and moms with misplaced conviction within the masculinizing results of fishing journeys. However the place “Shuggie Bain” centered on the devotion of a son to his radiant, self-destructive mom, “Younger Mungo” is about one other pressure: old flame throughout sectarian strains.

On this regard, it’s extra paying homage to the creator’s earliest printed work. The protagonist of “Discovered Wanting,” Stuart’s 2020 brief story, has positioned a lonely-hearts advert: “M — 17, Discreet, Not Out.” Our correspondent is “Shy” and “In search of identical”; “likes” embody “Michelle Pfeiffer, Thomas Hardy.” One other story, “The Englishman” (additionally printed in The New Yorker), likewise follows a younger homosexual man from working-class Scotland within the Nineteen Eighties. In every story, it’s too confronting, or not but potential, for the protagonists to decide on lovers their very own age, the boys they actually need. We’re by no means instructed why the Glasgow lad of “Discovered Wanting” settles for the solicitor, who carries him off to Edinburgh, as an alternative of writing again to the lonely crofter’s son. “The Englishman,” set in London, is Stuart’s reply to Hollinghurst and Forster, tales the place working-class boys are the quiescent objects of upper-middle-class males.

“Shuggie Bain,” in the meantime, facilities on a prim, precocious boy who all people can see is “no’ proper,” who’s fooling nobody when he claims to have had a girlfriend named Madonna at his earlier housing scheme. The novel follows Shuggie from age 5 to 16, to the precipice of a brand new and unsure autonomous life, following the long-looming dying of his beloved mom. “Younger Mungo” bridges the worlds of Stuart’s earlier novel and tales.

Whereas we acknowledge the setting, the emotional panorama is subtly completely different. Mungo has by no means observed James Jamieson, the light, “purposeful, solitary” boy who lives throughout the way in which and tends pigeons within the “forgotten place behind the tenements.” James has a lifeless mom and an avoidant father. One Sunday night within the empty Jamieson flat, Mungo roughhouses along with his new buddy to puncture a uncommon second of surliness. He doesn’t have a mode for expressing tough emotions that doesn’t contain hostility, and expects James to struggle again. As an alternative, James places his arm round him. “However, comfortable! what mild by yonder window breaks?” cracks Jodie, Mungo’s sister, when she sees him pining throughout the passageway. The 2 boys are saved aside by forces as vehement because the antipathy between the Montagues and Capulets, and simply as wasteful: the hatred between Protestants and Catholics, for one, however the homophobia of their fathers and brothers, too.

Stuart writes superbly, with marvelous attunement to the poetry within the unlovely and the mundane. A “row of enamel marks on the windowsill” are “good little half-moons of tension.” A person on the street misplaced in daydream weeps “huge dewdrop tears.” Mungo lies toppled after a violent brawl, inhaling the “damp evening air in little lopsided sips.” The novel conveys an enveloping sense of place, partially by the wit and musicality of its dialogue. It’s animated, like “Shuggie,” by devotion to Glasgow. Stuart is keen on the symbolism of saints; Mungo derives his uncommon title from the town’s legendary patron and founder. “Ah should’ve been mad to offer ye such a reputation,” says his mom. “Stephen would have been advantageous,” he replies, “David. John.” The novel is exact, primarily in rendering what’s seen to the attention moderately than in fine-grained interiority. Characters articulate nearly all the things they assume and really feel, and what they are saying is what they really imply. Irony happens within the hole between speech and actuality, moderately than the interstices of speech and thought.

Two timelines unfold concurrently. One is a fishing journey within the current. The opposite, Mungo and James’s love story, takes place within the latest previous. The 2 plots sit oddly astride one another, producing suspense, however by no means fairly cohering, particularly when occasions flip towards the violent. And regardless of ample narrative problems, the ebook’s most shocking and affecting moments are quieter: a brother and sister on a bus rattling silently towards an empty sky; an previous mother-son ritual for destroying laddered tights; a postcard with no person to ship it to.

The ebook’s climax joins the timelines, suggesting that the bigger thriller is how Mungo has ended up within the wilderness with two unusual males. However the reader can already think about the reply all too nicely, having way back discerned an aura of maternal heedlessness and neglect. Issues occur to Mungo that he believes he’ll by no means be capable of share with anybody. He finds it insufferable to be perceived; he worries there’s something in him that marks him out for loneliness and ache. And but Mungo, greater than every other Stuart protagonist, is given the chance to decide on love — a sort which may open and flower into bizarre flourishing, not the variability that immortalizes within the face of inevitable doom. When he’s with James it feels as if he has the chance to rewrite the previous via the longer term, that he can select tenderness over concealment and destruction. Which model of him is true?