book review of young mungo

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Brace yourself for 'Young Mungo,' a nuanced heartbreaker of a novel

Maureen Corrigan

A coming-of-age story about a gay, working-class boy set in 1980s Glasgow, in which the characters sometimes speak in Scots dialect. Such a tale is not an easy sell, which is why Douglas Stuart's debut novel, Shuggie Bain , was initially turned down by over 30 publishers before finding an audience and eventually winning the Booker Prize in 2020.

It's tough to follow such a success story, but if Stuart was cowed, his latest novel doesn't betray any artistic hesitations. Young Mungo , like its predecessor, is a nuanced and gorgeous heartbreaker of a novel. Reading it is like peering into the apartment of yet another broken family whose Glasgow tenement might be down the road from Shuggie Bain's.

The two characters, in fact, share some crucial similarities: like Shuggie, 15-year-old Mungo Hamilton is gay and Mungo's mother is also an alcoholic. What's different about Stuart's new novel is its form: The outer frame here is a suspense story; a story not just of innocence lost, but slaughtered.

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'shuggie bain' will lift you up — and tear you up.

The novel opens on a scene of Mungo being led away from his tenement home as his mother, drinking a tea mug of fortified wine, watches impassively from a window. He's, reluctantly, in the company of two men, strangers, both hard-looking. They're taking Mungo off for a camping trip, where he's to be taught to gut fish, make a fire, learn to be a man.

Sandwiched between the two men in the back of a bus, Mungo has a bad feeling, so his chronic facial tic starts acting up. Mungo suffers from anxiety; as his kindly older sister, Jodie, reflects: "There was a gentleness to his being that put girls at ease; they wanted to make a pet of him. But that sweetness unsettled other boys."

Stuart structures this story mostly in the form of a flashback to the months preceding this menacing camping trip. As he did so deftly in Shuggie Bain , Stuart takes us readers deep into the working class world of Glasgow — here, circa early 1990s — where jobs and trade unions have been gutted.

Stuart, who grew up in this world, has said in interviews that he doesn't want to take middle class readers on what he's called a "working class poverty safari." Accordingly he doesn't translate, but lets the life of the tenements make itself known though his precisely observed and often wry style. For instance, here's a scene where Mungo has been summoned by his brother Hamish, a vicious teenage gang leader and new father. Mungo steps into the flat where Hamish and his gang are watching TV:

The settee had six of the boys from the builder's yard crammed on to it. They were packed thigh to thigh and spilled over the arms of the small sofa. In their nylon tracksuits they looked like so many plastic bags all stuffed together; ... On the soundless television, an English woman was dipping a vase into liquid and showing the audience how to crackle glaze the surface of it. Each one of the young men was staring slack-jawed at the screen. On the low table in front of them sat a bundle of folded nappies amongst a pile of stolen car radios, half-drunk bottles of MD 20/20, and one very large tomahawk. . . . The woman stopped glazing her vase and held it out for the cameras to see the intricate swirls. The young men looked from one to another in amazement; white pearls of acne flushed across their foreheads. "That's pure beautiful," said [a] ginger-headed boy. They all nodded in agreement."

Immediately after that art appreciation interlude, Hamish forcibly arms Mungo with a switchblade and insists Mungo accompany him on a job — all to toughen him up. The toxic masculinity of Mungo's world is as pervasive and aggressive as the beat of the techno music the gang listens to. Then, one day: deliverance. Mungo meets a boy named James who keeps pigeons in a dovecote on a sliver of nearby wasteland. They fall in love, and, as if that weren't dangerous enough, James is Catholic and Mungo is Protestant.

We readers know none of this will end well, but it's a testament to Stuart's unsparing powers as a storyteller that we can't possibly anticipate how very badly — and baroquely — things will turn out. Young Mungo is a suspense story wrapped around a novel of acute psychological observation. It's hard to imagine a more disquieting and powerful work of fiction will be published anytime soon about the perils of being different.

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Book Review on Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo

After reading Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain , I expected Young Mungo to be another gritty experience. However, I was surprised to find it more uplifting than his earlier work, which had notably divided one of my book clubs.

The two books share many similarities: both are set in Glasgow and follow the story of a teenage boy in a dysfunctional family where alcoholism looms large. Yet, Young Mungo stands out as a surprisingly touching love story.

Mungo Hamilton , the 15-year-old protagonist of Young Mungo , is named after Glasgow’s patron saint and is torn between the expectations of his Protestant family and his love for James, a Catholic boy. Set in 1993, a time when homophobia is rampant, Mungo faces immense pressure from his tough family, particularly his elder brother, who expects him to prove his masculinity through violence, thievery, and aggression. Life is harsh for the entire family, with the novel unfolding against a backdrop of poverty. It’s no surprise that Mungo’s bright sister, Jodie , longs to escape.

Like Shuggie Bain , the story in Young Mungo teeters on the edge of becoming unbearably bleak but narrowly avoids it. Physical and sexual abuse are frequent themes, and alcoholism—driven by a desperate need to escape grim realities—prevents Mungo’s mother from fully loving him. Despite these harsh conditions, Mungo’s inherent goodness shines through. This is especially evident in his moments of compassion and resilience, contrasting sharply with the more harrowing and traumatic experiences he endures, such as the fishing trip with the men his mother barely knows.

Every now and then, a book tugs at the reader’s heartstrings, and Young Mungo does just that. It is both tender and tough, heartbreaking and full of love, violent and forgiving. The story is narrow in its setting yet universal in its themes, making it impossible not to care deeply for Mungo and hope for the best for him. Stuart masterfully evokes a strong emotional response, almost akin to a sense of love for the characters, while steering clear of anything remotely twee. It is real, gritty, and believable. As a middle-aged mother, I find myself seeing different things in this book than a twentysomething reader might, yet I imagine it would resonate equally with both.

In many respects, Young Mungo serves as a rite of passage for several characters, with this journey often tied to a desperate need to escape—from themselves, their circumstances, or both. For Mungo and James, however, the need to escape isn’t about running away from who they are, but rather a quest to find a place where they can be their authentic selves. Young Mungo is a remarkable read, skillfully using character and setting to depict not just the bad and the ugly but also the goodness of life.

Book Club Questions on Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo

·        Th e book  Young Mungo  is full of examples of betrayal. What do you consider to be the biggest betrayal and why?

·        What do you think will happen to Mungo after the police visit at the end of the book?

·        In Young Mungo Hamish is presented as a violent and tough character who fights partly for reputation and partly just because it is fun. Does his behaviour at the very end of the book, when he pretends to be Mungo, surprise you?

·        Jodie is groomed and abused by Mr. Campbell. Discuss how you reacted to this instance in the story.

·        Mungo navigates a life filled with conflicting expectations—between his family’s harsh realities and his relationship with James. How does Mungo’s dual existence reflect the broader themes of identity and belonging in the novel? In what ways does his journey challenge or affirm these themes?

·        Discuss Mungo’s mum and her actions. To what extent can you sympathise, empathise or perhaps understand some of the less savoury aspects to her personality? Do you think she loves her children?

·        The novel is set in Glasgow during the early 1990s, a time and place characterized by significant social and economic challenges. How do you think the specific setting of Glasgow during this period influences the characters’ lives and decisions?

·        Despite the grim circumstances, the novel presents moments of hope and resilience. How do these elements contribute to the overall tone of the book? Are there specific moments or interactions that you found particularly significant in demonstrating Mungo’s ability to find hope and strength despite his hardships?

·        How is the theme of education explored through Jodie’s character and her ambitions? How does the novel use education to highlight differences in opportunities and aspirations among the characters, and what does this reveal about social mobility and personal growth.

·        James finds solace in tending to pigeons and racing them, an activity that contrasts sharply with his harsh reality. How does this unusual hobby serve as a form of escape for James, and what does it reveal about his inner world and desires?

Book club Questions on Young Mungo (for if you haven't read the book)

·       Siblings Jodie, Hamish, and Mungo have very different personalities despite growing up in the same challenging environment. Why do you think children raised in similar circumstances can turn out so differently? Discuss the concept of nature versus nurture, and perhaps reflect on how it applies in your own life.

·       Douglas Stuart grew up in Glasgow, frequently moving and facing a difficult family life. Considering this, who do you think he is writing for? Is his intended audience likely more middle-class than those he grew up around? Does that matter in the context of his work? Discuss the impact of an author’s background and audience on the themes and reception of their writing.

·       Towards the end of the novel, Mungo pictures his future and contemplates what would happen if he stays in Glasgow. Have you ever had an epiphany that has changed the course of your life? Please feel free to share.

·       When Mungo is hitchhiking home after the ‘fishing trip,’ he is picked up by Calum, who hints at but doesn’t explicitly mention that his own son is gay. To what extent do you believe attitudes towards same-sex relationships in the UK have evolved over the past twenty-five years?

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2022

IndieBound Bestseller

YOUNG MUNGO

by Douglas Stuart ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2022

Romantic, terrifying, brutal, tender, and, in the end, sneakily hopeful. What a writer.

Two 15-year-old Glasgow boys, one Protestant and one Catholic, share a love against all odds.

The Sighthill tenement where Shuggie Bain (2020), Stuart's Booker Prize–winning debut, unfurled is glimpsed in his follow-up, set in the 1990s in an adjacent neighborhood. You wouldn't think you'd be eager to return to these harsh, impoverished environs, but again this author creates characters so vivid, dilemmas so heart-rending, and dialogue so brilliant that the whole thing sucks you in like a vacuum cleaner. As the book opens, Mungo's hard-drinking mother, Mo-Maw, is making a rare appearance at the flat where Mungo lives with his 16-year-old sister, Jodie. Jodie has full responsibility for the household, as their older brother, Hamish, a Proddy warlord, lives with the 15-year-old mother of his child and her parents. Mo-Maw's come by only to pack her gentle son off on a manly fishing trip with two disreputable strangers. Though everything about these men is alarming to Mungo, "fifteen years he had lived and breathed in Scotland, and he had never seen a glen, a loch, a forest, or a ruined castle." So at least there's that to look forward to. This ultracreepy weekend plays out over the course of the book, interleaved with the events of the months before. Mungo has met a neighbor boy named James, who keeps racing pigeons in a "doocot"; the boys are kindred spirits and offer each other a tenderness utterly absent from any other part of their lives. But a same-sex relationship across the sectarian divide is so unthinkable that their every interaction is laced with fear. Even before Hamish gets wind of these goings-on, he too has decided to make Mungo a man, forcing him to participate in a West Side Story –type gang battle. As in Shuggie Bain , the yearning for a mother's love is omnipresent, even on the battlefield. "They kept their chests puffed out until they could be safe in their mammies’ arms again; where they could coorie into her side as she watched television and she would ask, 'What is all this, eh, what’s with all these cuddles?' and they would say nothing, desperate to just be boys again, wrapped up safe in her softness."

Pub Date: April 5, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-8021-5955-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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SEEN & HEARD

New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND

by Richard Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 20, 2021

A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.

A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.

Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son  and Black Boy , this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.

Pub Date: April 20, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Library of America

Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Richard Wright

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

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By Yen Pham

• April 6, 2022

YOUNG MUNGO

By Douglas Stuart

When 15-year-old Mungo and his brother Hamish speed through central Glasgow in a car the latter has been paid to steal, the neighborhoods are new to Mungo; he has barely traveled beyond the confines of a few narrow streets. Like “Shuggie Bain,” Stuart’s 2020 Booker Prize-winning first novel, “Young Mungo” has a lived-in understanding of the textures of life with an alcoholic parent, and mothers with misplaced conviction in the masculinizing effects of fishing trips. But where “Shuggie Bain ” centered on the devotion of a son to his radiant, self-destructive mother, “Young Mungo” is about another strain: first love across sectarian lines.

In this regard, it’s more reminiscent of the author’s earliest published work. The protagonist of “Found Wanting,” Stuart’s 2020 short story, has placed a lonely-hearts ad: “M — 17, Discreet, Not Out.” Our correspondent is “Shy” and “Looking for same”; “likes” include “Michelle Pfeiffer, Thomas Hardy.” Another story, “The Englishman” (also published in The New Yorker), likewise follows a young gay man from working-class Scotland in the 1980s. In each story, it’s too confronting, or not yet possible, for the protagonists to choose lovers their own age, the boys they really desire. We are never told why the Glasgow lad of “Found Wanting” settles for the solicitor, who carries him off to Edinburgh, instead of writing back to the lonely crofter’s son. “The Englishman,” set in London, is Stuart’s answer to Hollinghurst and Forster, stories where working-class boys are the quiescent objects of upper-middle-class men.

“Shuggie Bain,” meanwhile, centers on a prim, precocious boy who everybody can see is “no’ right,” who’s fooling no one when he claims to have had a girlfriend named Madonna at his previous housing scheme. The novel follows Shuggie from age 5 to 16, to the precipice of a new and uncertain autonomous life, following the long-looming death of his beloved mother. “Young Mungo” bridges the worlds of Stuart’s earlier novel and stories.

While we recognize the setting, the emotional landscape is subtly different. Mungo has never noticed James Jamieson, the gentle, “purposeful, solitary” boy who lives across the way and tends pigeons in the “forgotten place behind the tenements.” James has a dead mother and an avoidant father. One Sunday evening in the empty Jamieson flat, Mungo roughhouses with his new friend to puncture a rare moment of surliness. He doesn’t have a mode for expressing difficult feelings that doesn’t involve hostility, and expects James to fight back. Instead, James puts his arm around him. “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?” cracks Jodie, Mungo’s sister, when she sees him pining across the passageway. The two boys are kept apart by forces as vehement as the antipathy between the Montagues and Capulets, and just as wasteful: the hatred between Protestants and Catholics, for one, but the homophobia of their fathers and brothers, too.

Stuart writes beautifully, with marvelous attunement to the poetry in the unlovely and the mundane. A “row of teeth marks on the windowsill” are “perfect little half-moons of anxiety.” A man in the street lost in daydream weeps “big dewdrop tears.” Mungo lies toppled after a violent brawl, inhaling the “damp night air in little lopsided sips.” The novel conveys an enveloping sense of place, in part through the wit and musicality of its dialogue. It is animated, like “Shuggie,” by devotion to Glasgow. Stuart is fond of the symbolism of saints; Mungo derives his unusual name from the city’s mythical patron and founder. “Ah must’ve been mad to give ye such a name,” says his mother. “Stephen would have been fine,” he replies, “David. John.” The novel is precise, primarily in rendering what is visible to the eye rather than in fine-grained interiority. Characters articulate almost everything they think and feel, and what they say is what they actually mean. Irony occurs in the gap between speech and reality, rather than the interstices of speech and thought.

Two timelines unfold simultaneously. One is a fishing trip in the present. The other, Mungo and James’s love story, takes place in the recent past. The two plots sit oddly astride each other, generating suspense, but never quite cohering, especially when events turn toward the violent. And despite abundant narrative complications, the book’s most surprising and affecting moments are quieter: a brother and sister on a bus rattling silently toward an empty sky; an old mother-son ritual for destroying laddered tights; a postcard with nobody to send it to.

The book’s climax joins the timelines, suggesting that the larger mystery is how Mungo has ended up in the wilderness with two strange men. But the reader can already imagine the answer all too well, having long ago discerned an aura of maternal heedlessness and neglect. Things happen to Mungo that he believes he’ll never be able to share with anyone. He finds it unbearable to be perceived; he worries there is something in him that marks him out for loneliness and pain. And yet Mungo, more than any other Stuart protagonist, is given the opportunity to choose love — a kind that might open and flower into ordinary flourishing, not the variety that immortalizes in the face of inevitable doom. When he is with James it feels as if he has the opportunity to rewrite the past by means of the future, that he can choose tenderness over concealment and destruction. Which version of him is right?

Yen Pham is a writer and editor from Australia.

YOUNG MUNGO By Douglas Stuart 391 pp. Grove. $27.

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Young Mungo’s Greatest Triumph Is Booker Prize Winner Douglas Stuart’s Prose

Class and religion shape the “Shuggie Bain” author’s sophomore novel, by turns intimate and cosmic in scale.

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In 1997, The Full Monty , a British indie film, was a surprise critical and commercial smash, depicting the outer foibles and inner lives of six unemployed men in industrial Sheffield, England, a mix of straight and gay, who form a Chippendale’s-style burlesque for income. With its punchy script and superb performances, the film probed masculinity with an honesty and freshness missing from our cultural conversations, ranging from economic anxiety to body image to suicide to same-sex desire. In the background loomed the invisible figure of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, whose draconian policies had slashed social safety nets across her nation, cruelties she seemed to relish. She wasn’t famous as the “Iron Lady” for nothing.

Further north, in strapped Scotland, conditions were even more dire. Douglas Stuart’s second novel, Young Mungo —set in 1991, amid Glasgow’s drab public-housing sprawls, known as schemes—is a blazing marvel of storytelling, as strong and possibly stronger than his Booker Prize-winning debut, Shuggie Bain. A tale of star-crossed love between two adolescent boys, a Protestant and a Catholic, Young Mungo is as affecting, original, and brilliantly written a novel as any we’ll see in 2022.

The title character, Mungo Hamilton, is named after the city’s patron saint. Born to a teenaged girl after his father’s accidental death, he’s a gentle spirit with a facial tic, fond of sketching and animals, devoted to his aspirational older sister, Jodie, and their absentee mother, Maureen, or Mo-Maw. His brother, Hamish, the eldest, is the merciless leader of local Protestant hooligans. A school dropout and already a father to an infant daughter, Hamish thrives by his wits and his fists, brawling, thieving, and dealing drugs; he’s eager to initiate Mungo into his brand of street masculinity.

The novel toggles between two narrative strands that eventually braid together. Young Mungo opens in late spring as Mo-Maw, briefly home between boyfriends and bouts with the bottle, sends Mungo off with a pair of acquaintances from AA, also former inmates: St. Christopher, a skeletal shell who claims to be an expert fisherman, and Gallowgate, a muscle-taut, tattooed menace. They’re heading to the Highlands for a bank holiday, a long weekend that Mo-Maw hopes will make a man out of Mungo. Former inmates, St. Christopher and Gallowgate have other plans in mind as they camp along a loch miles from a village or even a phone booth.

Stuart deftly builds tension in these scenes by alternating with flashbacks to the preceding months. At home Mungo flails, with only Jodie to buoy him. He’s not a good student, like his sister. Hamish may abuse his brother, but he also worries about him, determined to recruit Mungo to his gang. Religious vendettas sweep across Glasgow, a low-boil conflict between “Oranges” (Protestants) and “Fenians” (Catholics). The three Hamilton children grapple with these prejudices and the shame of poverty. There’s no redemption because few can imagine a better future. There’s no road map out of this ghetto—Mungo hasn’t even traveled beyond the city. From political hostilities to personal anguish, Stuart harmonizes his notes, pitch-perfect.

Something sparks inside Mungo when he meets James, a tall, gap-toothed boy who lives with his widower father in a slate-roofed building behind the Hamiltons. James traps and trains pigeons in his doocot, a run-down tower. Unlike most of Mungo’s peers, James is a “papist” whose parent has a steady gig on a North Sea oil rig; this veneer of stability places him a rung higher on the meager social ladder. Mungo works up the courage to visit James at his home: “The buzzer razzed and he was grateful to step into the dry close mouth. The close was lined to shoulder height in gold and brown diamond patterned tiles. Each landing had a floral stained-glass window that filled the stone stairwell with fractals of beautiful light. It was the same housing scheme as Mungo’s, but he could tell the council agents who managed this close took more pride in its upkeep. The families who lived here were—by the slightest faction—better off.” Attraction kicks in, but they’re careful to maintain a cone of secrecy. They know what’s at stake for boys like them.

Class and religion, then, shape the novel, by turns intimate and cosmic in scale. A brutal code of masculinity broods over these characters: Transgressions mount, from shoplifting and assault to unthinkable crimes. Stuart won’t let us look away. Mungo is both repulsed and seduced by the swagger of Hamish and his cronies, but ultimately he’s a lover, not a fighter. He takes immense pleasure in the curls along the nape of James’s neck, kisses stolen in private. Boys and men in all their savagery and tenderness: This is Stuart’s grand theme.

But if the men of Glasgow are toxic, then so, too, are the women. Mo-Maw is a monster only a son could love. She floats in a boozy haze between her boyfriend, Jocky (an unexpectedly sympathetic figure), a job as a short-order cook, and the “weans” she rarely considers. She conflates love with rage as well, confusing the boy: “Violence has always preceded affection. Mungo didn’t know any other way. Mo-Maw would crack her Scholl sandal off his back, purpling bruises curdling his cream skin, then she would realize she had gone too far and pull him into the softness of her breast. Jodie would scold and demean his poorly wired brain and then, feeling guilty, make a heaped bowl of warm Weetabix and white sugar.”

Young Mungo

To Jodie’s astonishment, Mungo falls again and again as their mother dangles the lure of her love only to withdraw it: “She hadn’t needed to ask if it was about Mo-Maw. Everything about this boy was about his mother. He lived for her in a way that she had never lived for him. It was as though Mo-Maw was a puppeteer, and she had the tangled, knotted strings of him in her hands. She animated every gesture he made: the timid smile, the thrumming nerves, the anxious biting, the worry, the pleasing, the way he made himself smaller in any room he was in.” Mungo risks his body and soul for his narcissistic, negligent mother, and yet the reader gets it: She’s a captivating character in all her rot.

But Young Mungo ’s greatest triumph is Stuart’s prose. He leans into the colloquial quirks and beauties of Glaswegian voices, the opposite of posh Queen’s English but equally rich. There’s jazz and bounce in his sentences—his cadences are rollicking, his dialogue often comic—but also a meticulous precision; I counted exactly one edit-worthy clause in the entire novel. I felt the same frisson as when I read works by other leading innovators, among them Kevin Barry, Hilary Mantel, Arundhati Roy, Ali Smith, and Colson Whitehead.

The pace quickens as Stuart’s stories merge, darkness eclipsing Mungo and James. Betrayals occur. Blood flows and bones shatter. Violence whips up like a storm off the Atlantic. And yet Mungo somehow grasps onto a fragment of his own goodness, a wonder at the world beyond his miserable patch. There’s a hint of hope among Stuart’s exquisite sentences, as when the boy roams the Highlands, trying to escape his tormentors: “On the far side of the river, a roe buck browsed a low clump of goosegrass. It stopped Mungo in his tracks. He held his breath as the deer raised its head and looked in their direction. Its eyes were as dark and west as two peeled plums. The deer flicked its ears, scanning the forests for any unfamiliar sounds. On its head was a small set of underdeveloped antlers, and it made Mungo wonder where the deer’s mother was.”

A former book editor and the author of a memoir, This Boy's Faith, Hamilton Cain is Contributing Books Editor at Oprah Daily. As a freelance journalist, he has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Health, The Good Men Project, and The List (Edinburgh, U.K.) and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle and lives with his family in Brooklyn.  

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Review: How Douglas Stuart subverts the Victorian coming-of-age plot

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Young Mungo

By Douglas Stuart Grove: 400 pages, $27 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

The story goes that in the sixth century a young boy called Kentigern saw some other little rascals pelting robins with stones. One bird fell to the ground, and after the scamps scattered, Kentigern stroked its feathers and prayed. Moments later, the robin flew off, revived. This maybe-miracle is one of four that hagiographers attribute to Kentigern, who became known as St. Mungo, the patron saint of Glasgow and namesake of Douglas Stuart ’s bear hug of a new novel, “ Young Mungo ,” which follows great cruelty with great tenderness.

Like Kentigern, people in the follow-up to Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning debut, “ Shuggie Bain ,” are rarely known by their given names. Fifteen-year-old Mungo’s older brother Hamish, a teenage Proddy Bill the Butcher , demands to be called Ha-Ha, though he evokes dread rather than laughs. Their mammy Maureen is Mo-Maw, a distinctly unmotherish moniker for a parent who sloshes down lagers and undoes her top two buttons before her shift as a late-night snack cart attendant. Mo-Maw infrequents Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with the likes of Every-Other-Wednesday Nora, Mount Ellen-Ellen and Cranhill-Cathy. St. Christopher, “a man with a single suit and a bag full of drink,” and self-tattooed, ropy Gallowgate are the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who cart Mungo off on a menacing fishing holiday in the novel’s first chapter.

Only the earnest escape nicknames: Jodie, Mungo’s barely older sister and surrogate mum, and James — simply James — Mungo’s motherless jug-eared love, the Catholic boy who lives across the trash heap.

Names are useful masks in the East End of Thatcherized early 1990s Glasgow, where stolen car radios clutter up coffee tables, out-of-work shipbuilders whale on their wives and terrified 11-year-old Catholic and Protestant boys clutch lead pipes while they do their bit for the sectarian divide. (When Mungo asks why they fight the Catholics, Ha-Ha replies, “It’s about honour, mibbe? Territory? Reputation? ... Honestly, ah don’t really know. But it’s f— good fun.”) This working-class lot can’t separate pride from envy; they sniff at the West End, “with its gothic spires and ancient university and outdoor cafés with vegetarian menus.” (Mungo is a Scot who has never seen a castle.) You can’t ever be yourself in a place you can’t escape — too risky — so everyone becomes someone else.

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“Young Mungo” has the same yeasty whiff of the autobiographical as the gorgeous “Shuggie Bain,” and the two share more than a little in common: booze-guzzling mums, hidden gay love, a thick coating of post-industrial grime. (If you adored “Shuggie Bain,” in all its lively misery and lush detail, “Young Mungo” will please you on every page. If you didn’t, what’s wrong with you?)

This sophomore effort flashes back and forth between the springtime unfurling of Mungo and James’ love (forged in the dovecote where James raises pigeons) and the goose-pimpling fishing expedition a few months later. St. Christopher and Gallowgate tell Mungo they’ve hauled him out of the city to “make him a man,” a mission they share with every other adult in his life. Figuring out how he came to be in the clutches of these strangers makes up the balance of this tear-cranking story.

From the beginning, Mungo’s mother has checked out for a pawn shop owner called Jocky; while Jodie keeps the cupboards from going bare, she’s also caught up in a lopsided affair of her own. Which leaves Mungo, a remarkably pretty child, alone to chew the furniture (literally, he leaves teeth marks on windowsills and remote controls).

He meets James in the grass between tenements, “a purgatory only forty feet wide.” At first they talk pigeons; then they sink into a lovely shared loneliness, inching their way toward intimacy as they binge on treats from the “Aladdin’s cave of sugar” James’ father leaves behind when he goes to work on an oil rig for weeks at a time. In this novel, neglect comes in a thousand different shades.

It’s a classic Dickensian arc: The unwanted young lad, hoping for better things, is caught up in broader violent schemes and made to choose between the life he wants for himself and the one set out before him. (I started to keep an eye out for the Artful Dodger.) But novelists have been flaccidly imitating the 19th century realists for so long that it’s a shock when one carries it out this successfully. Stuart oozes story. Mungo is alive. There is feeling under every word.

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To be clear, under no circumstances should you believe that this novel is anything less than bleak. It’s a bloody business being a Glaswegian boy, and “Young Mungo” reads like an emergency room physician’s list of cases: bashed noses, shattered teeth and mangled limbs. Group dynamics revolve around escalating barbarity; it’s a sport and bond. When one boy in Ha-Ha’s crew climbs a ladder to break into a builder’s yard, “the other young men took turns at kicking the bottom of it. It must have been a great entertainment, for they were whooping and betting money on him cracking his skull.”

Embedded in these brutal games is the childish logic — perfectly rational in their circumstances — that savagery is a prerequisite for love. Mungo and James wallop each other as they become friends, but when they end up sharing a bed they take “great pains to not touch.” They don’t know how to embrace without the pretext of cruelty. “Violence always preceded affection; Mungo didn’t know any other way.” When they eventually kiss, James offers, “We could pretend it was a headbutt if you like.”

Touch is Stuart’s keenest sense. His Scotland is a place of scratchy wool sweaters, Dr. Scholl’s clogs across the back and pinkie fingers that transmit electricity. Mungo’s body is an ongoing experiment — exposed to every element, stroked by some, “split” by others. This David Copperfield can’t study his way out of the slums. Stuart turns the Victorian novel’s idea of adulthood as redemption into a farce — a body can’t outgrow its own formation.

This novel cuts you and then bandages you back up. A few pages later — another slash. Yet Stuart doesn’t delight in misery the way writers such as Hanya Yanagihara seem to. Misery is just a necessary ingredient in his novels of sentimental education, the hit of salt that makes the sugar sing.

And oh, let’s not neglect the wide-armed pleasure of “Young Mungo”! One remarkable scene clocks Mungo and James bicycling out of their neighborhood for the first time, heading eastward no matter where it takes them. They land in a sea of grass bigger than any they’ve ever seen; they kiss and caress over the green and under the blue. It’s a rare sunny day and the wide-open sky turns them giddy and brave. It feels like my own memory. It feels like that’s all it might be for Mungo one day too.

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‘Young Mungo’ seals it: Douglas Stuart is a genius

Fifteen-year-old Mungo shows the kind of vulnerability that makes people want to cradle him — or crush him. He’s the tender Scottish hero of Douglas Stuart’s moving new novel, “ Young Mungo .” It’s a tale of romantic and sexual awakening punctuated by horrific violence. Amid all its suffering, Mungo’s story makes two things strikingly clear: 1) Being named after the patron saint of Glasgow offers no protection, and 2) Stuart writes like an angel.

Few novelists have ever ascended so quickly, but the suddenness of Stuart’s success belies years of struggle. His debut novel, “ Shuggie Bain ,” was rejected by dozens of publishers before Grove Atlantic finally recognized the manuscript’s genius. It went on to win the Booker Prize in 2020, propelling the Scottish American writer to worldwide fame.

Now, just two years later, Stuart is back with another masterful family drama set in the economic ruin of Glasgow after Margaret Thatcher’s devastating reign. This is a hopeless realm of demolished industries, substance abuse and generational poverty. As in “Shuggie Bain,” the protagonist is a boy, the youngest of three siblings being raised by an alcoholic mother. But if Stuart has not departed much from the scaffolding of his debut novel, he has managed to produce a story with a very different shape and pace.

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Set in the early 1990s, “Young Mungo” alternates between two tracks about five months apart. In the earlier sections, we’re introduced to the notorious Hamilton family. Hamish, Mungo’s eldest sibling, is a Protestant gang leader who compensates for his diminished height with excess brutality. Stuart choreographs the young thugs’ street brawls with all their surging adrenaline and tactical ingenuity. Hamish hates police, Catholics and “poofters,” but the only thing he’s been able to teach Mungo is that “it was dazzling, how something marvelous could be destroyed so quickly and so completely.”

Jodie, the lone daughter, has assumed all the domestic responsibilities neglected by their selfish mother, who vanishes for days at a time to pursue another man or bottle. Mo-Maw, as they call her, is like some pickled nightmare from the mind of Tennessee Williams — 80 proof selfishness heavily flavored with vanity and sentimentality.

But Mungo loves Mo-Maw unconditionally; it’s his nature, his tragic flaw. “Try and remember the good bits, eh?” he says during one of her unannounced disappearances. “She’s not all bad.”

“Honestly,” a neighbor sighs, “you’re all kindness and no common sense.”

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The raw poetry of Stuart’s prose is perfect to catch the open spirit of this handsome boy, with his strange facial tics. “Mungo had all this love to give,” Stuart writes, “and it lay about him like ripened fruit and nobody bothered to gather it up.” Denied the attachment he craves, he’s grown hypersensitive to the static electricity of rage constantly building up and discharging in their dingy apartment. That role has kept him vacillating on the threshold of adulthood, though he’s only a year younger than his sister. “His unruly mop of hair made women want to mother him,” Stuart writes. “But that sweetness unsettled other boys.”

The most charming chapters of the novel recount Mungo’s budding romance with a kind teenager named James who raises racing pigeons. He’s Catholic, but that’s hardly the greatest mark against him. Mungo and James have no words — at least no positive words — for what they are or what they’re feeling, but with hesitant delight, they try to figure out how to express their affection. Lying in the grass with James watching the clouds roll by one afternoon, Mungo notes that “waves of loveliness ebbed over him followed by waves of shame. They came like Jodie alternating the hot and cold taps and trying to balance a bath with him already in it.”

The way Stuart carves out this oasis amid a rising tide of homophobia infuses these scenes with almost unbearable poignancy. But there’s no mistaking the dangers Mungo and James face. In the streets of Glasgow, gay men — or men suspected of being gay — are routinely beaten for sport by bullies like Hamish. The fastidious bachelor who lives above the Hamiltons is regarded with open disgust. Mungo can hear his mother’s alarm when she frets about how to make a man out of him — a phrase repeated so often that it seems to sprout up around Mungo like bars on a cage.

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In fact, the whole novel turns on that panic about Mungo’s supposedly imperiled masculinity. In alternate chapters, we follow the young man on a fishing trip over a holiday weekend. Growing up so poor that he’s never left the city, Mungo is nervously excited about seeing a forest, a loch, a fish! His mother has entrusted him to the care of two men from her AA meeting. Old St. Christopher and his fit young buddy seem, at first, like harmless drunks, Scottish versions of the King and the Duke drifting down the Mississippi with Huck Finn.

But these chapters are soaked with menace. Stuart quickly proves himself an extraordinarily effective thriller writer. He’s capable of pulling the strings of suspense excruciatingly tight while still sensitively exploring the confused mind of this gentle adolescent trying to make sense of his sexuality.

The result is a novel that moves toward two crises simultaneously: whatever happened with James in Glasgow and whatever might happen to Mungo in the Scottish wilds. The one is a foregone calamity we can only intuit; the other an approaching horror we can only dread. But even as Stuart draws these timelines together like a pair of scissors, he creates a little space for Mungo’s future, a little mercy for this buoyant young man.

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post.

Young Mungo

By Douglas Stuart

Grove. 390 pp. $27

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