It's a happy thing, when an author writes a second novel that is even better than the first. Especially when the first was so stupendously excellent. We have a rare talent in Douglas Stuart. He is able to bring the most unglamorous of settings to life so vibrantly that as much as the reader might be repelled by the squalor of early nineties tenements in the east end of Glasgow, we are also fascinated enough to want to peer a little more closely into this world of difference; this unknown landscape of language and violence and doocots. I'm pleased to be in Glasgow again, pleased that Stuart knew there was much more to give the reader from the frontline of a history that is not often told. And what's a doocot? A doocot is a dovecote but if you still need help, they are structures for housing pigeons, containing compartments for the birds to roost and lay eggs.
Young Mungo follows the coming of age of Protestant Mungo Hamilton who, we are told early on, "would do anything just to make other people feel better." As Stuart begins to illustrate the brutal environment of the housing estates where Mungo lives, with the descriptive power of Dickens, we realise that a boy like Mungo may not fair well in this environment of toxic masculinity. One day, Mungo stumbles across James, another boy with a gentle nature who also happens to be a Catholic. James has rebuilt an old doocot and occupies himself caring for his pigeons that he houses within. These gentle, star-crossed lovers, beautifully symbolised by the Wolfgang Tillmans' picture on the book's cover, are destined to be crushed by the environment in which they have to live. This creates a tension throughout the novel in much the same way that a tension manifested in Shuggie Bain. However, in Young Mungo, the feeling of tension explodes in the last chapters of the novel when the plot seems to race towards its final crescendo of multiple acts of violence, in which we understand that being brutalised is not a choice but a necessity in order to stay alive.
The plotting and pace of the book are some of the qualities that give it the edge over Shuggie Bain. Equally, the characters are more multifaceted in Young Mungo. The mother in Shuggie Bain was in some ways, too good to be true. Although we view her through the lens of the adoring young son, the lines she speaks are often so articulate and formidable it is hard to believe that she is really the uneducated drunk we know her to be. In Young Mungo, the mother figure Mo-Maw is more believable than the rose-tinted, Tart-with-a-Heart depiction that we get from Shuggie. We learn from the outset that Mo-Maw is transformed by drink into her grotesquely self-serving alter ego Tattie-Bogle. Mo-Maw is at worst this drunken monster and at best painfully negligent in respect of her child-rearing. It is clear that it is too late for this woman to be redeemed. Instead, Stuart gives some of the best lines to Mungo's sister, Jodie. Jodie is the sober voice of an already disillusioned youth who is tirelessly trying to rescue her own and her brother's lives from the clutches of poverty. She is eminently quotable, providing memorable commentary on the chaotic lives around her. When she and Mungo finally find Mo-Maw, who has been absent some weeks, Jodie delivers a stinging dressing down to her mother,
"You don't fucking visit your own weans. Ya mad auld bitch. You come home every night and make sure they've been fed and cleaned and then ye tuck them into bed. You make sure they have done their homework and have had enough to eat for their lunch and then if you are fucking lucky ye get ten minutes peace to yersel afore ye start it all a-fuckin'-gain."
She shows her mettle again in chapter ten when she decides that she and Mungo must intervene in the domestic violence they can hear from the flat below theirs. This chapter is an exemplary short story. It could stand alone as a perfectly constructed narrative with beginning, middle and end; what it shows, with such subtlety and nuance, is the many ways in which poverty corrupts and perverts. It is evidence of Stuart's skill as storyteller, something that seems unlabored in its fullness. I can't wait for his third book.
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