Review | Young Mungo, Booker Prize winner’s follow-up to Shuggie Bain, is another bleak story of a queer adolescence set in Scotland
- Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize for his previous novel, and like it, Young Mungo has as its protagonist a queer Glasgow boy living in poverty and neglect
- When the Mungo of the title falls in love with another neglected teen, we’re given a break from bleakness so all-encompassing as to shroud Stuart’s artistry
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart, pub. Picador
Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain (2020) was an often heart-rending exploration of a family in 1980s Scotland whose life was splintered by poverty, neglect, alcoholism and deferred dreams. And at the centre of it all was a young boy too attached to his mother to find any room to care for himself – more concerned about her than he could ever be about the fledgling queer self that he could not possibly let bloom.
In Young Mungo, Stuart returns to this familiar and harrowing context, picking up – in a way – where Shuggie’s story ends by focusing on another young queer boy’s life and all the maddening heartbreak it commands.
Set primarily in Glasgow, the novel focuses on the Hamilton family: Maureen (called Mo-Maw), the alcoholic mother who drinks herself into stupors of long-standing absenteeism from her family; Hamish (called Ha Ha), the oldest son whose bitterness bleeds into chilling violence; Jodie, the middle daughter, intelligent enough that the promise of a life outside the smothering brokenness of her home looms over the responsibilities that threaten to keep her there; and Mungo, named somewhat cruelly after the patron saint of Glasgow, younger looking than his 15 years and naive to a fault: he will forgive anybody for anything, most of all his mother, whose wily manipulations make him love her even more.
“Everything about this boy was about his mother,” Jodie thinks, before later concluding, “She was a terrible mother.”
Their father (big Ha Ha), to whom Mo-Maw was never married, dies just before Mungo is born but each of them is affected by his absence, often in ways they don’t understand. Stuart is devastatingly detailed in his presentation of the life that follows.
