Review: 'Young Mungo,' by Douglas Stuart

Douglas Stuart's exhilarating, heartbreaking follow-up to his Booker Prize-winning novel "Shuggie Bain" arrives at an alarming time for LGBTQ youth, as state legislatures around the U.S. introduce and pass anti-LGBTQ measures.

One novel can't stop an onslaught, but it can eloquently remind us of the disastrous consequences of ignorance and intolerance. Set in the 1980s in a grim working-class neighborhood of Glasgow, "Young Mungo" is a love story about two teenage boys — one Protestant, one Catholic. But it's also a gut-wrenching story of survival, about how delicate things can bloom in a hard place, then all too easily be snuffed out.

At 15, Mungo has survived a childhood full of disappointment and neglect with fewer wounds than you might expect: He is not yet broken. He still loves his alcoholic mother, Mo-Maw, who has disappeared with a new man (his older sister Jodie, on the verge of university and escape, has given up on her). Still, the shadows that loom over Mungo — poverty, lack of opportunity, his violent older brother Hamish, a curious lack of interest in girls when most of his contemporaries are busily impregnating them — have not yet managed to dim his inner light.

"He smiled when he didn't want to," his mother notes. "He would do anything just to make other people feel better."

Still, Mungo understands he's different. He's not fragile, but he's increasingly unwilling to join Hamish's gang as they pursue their nightly activities (theft, drug sales, destruction of both property and Catholics). Then Mungo meets James, a Catholic boy who tends a rooftop dovecote, and suddenly a light winks on in his bleak existence.

The book shares a few similarities with "Shuggie Bain," but "Young Mungo" is more brutal, more suspenseful. Stuart reels out two story lines with equal attention to detail and emotion. In one, Mungo and James embark on a tentative friendship. In the other, set a few months later, Mungo's mother has sent her son off for a weekend of camping in the wilderness with two men she barely knows. Stuart wrings immense tension from both story lines, infusing the novel with an edgy, relentless urgency.

The language is gorgeous, poetic, expertly evoking the dour streets of Glasgow and its people. Mungo believes there's a demon in his mother, a "flat, eel-like snake with the jaw and beady eyes of a weasel and the matted coat of a mangy rat. It was a sleekit thing on a chain leash that shook her and dragged her toward things that she ought to be walking away from."

Every secondary character is well defined enough to carry his or her own novel, from Hamish and Jodie to James, whose father pushes him to get a girl, any girl, pregnant. Stuart shows us so much ugliness, but he offers a promise of hope, too. This book will hurt your heart, so reach for that hope. Sometimes it's all we can do.

Connie Ogle is a writer in Florida.

Young Mungo

By: Douglas Stuart.

Publisher: Grove, 400 pages, $27.

Event: 6 p.m. April 29, Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 Snelling Av. S., St. Paul. Ticket includes a copy of the book, $27, https://bit.ly/3IBMlZl

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