Young Mungo

Young Mungo is the second novel from the 2020 Booker Prize winner, Douglas Stuart. It’s a gritty, heartbreaking story set in working-class Glasgow in the post-Thatcher years. The main character, Mungo, is a 15-year-old boy living with his alcoholic mother, abusive brother and a genius sister. Mungo and his family are Protestant and when he meets and falls for James, his neighbor who not only is male but Catholic, it becomes very clear that their love is more than forbidden - it’s dangerous.I am absolutely blown away by this book. It reminded me of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life: a Great Gay Novel, except Young Mungo doesn’t focus on the elites and there’s much less trauma - which is not to say that it doesn’t have it at all. It’s a heart-wrenching, heavy novel that manages to find glimpses of joy and love in a sea of bleakness. It’s sad, yes, but it also makes space for hope, and that’s a big part of how satisfying it felt to read it. Since English isn’t my first language, accents written out in dialogue can be tricky and make reading a book more difficult, but although Stuart uses that technique here, I found the dialogue easy to follow and understand. The writing was gorgeous, reading Stuart’s style felt like watching a movie and some of the phrases he used will stay with me for a long time. The plot - a working-class, queer Romeo and Juliet story, but much darker - was familiar yet unique, and it hooked me from the very first page. The characters were so memorable and fascinating, so well-developed, that I couldn’t help but feel very strongly about every single one. It wasn’t always love, though - some characters in Young Mungo are the most despicable people I have ever read about. Mungo himself was my favorite - a gentle, scared boy searching for warmth and love.TLDR: Young Mungo is an extraordinary, powerful novel about difficult family relationships, queerness, masculinity, and finding tenderness in very hard places.

Jodie said he was gullible. Mo-Maw said she wished she had raised him to be cannier, less anybody’s fool. It was a funny thing to be a disappointment because you were honest and assumed others might be too. The games people played made his head hurt.Scottish-American writer Douglas Stuart’s first novel, SHUGGIE BAIN, was published in 2020 and won the prestigious 2020 Booker Prize. In his second novel, YOUNG MUNGO (2022; 400 pp.), Stuart returns for a second time to a Glasgow setting, this time to the 1990s to tell the story of another struggling working-class family, centering his story on the youngest child, fifteen-year-old, Mungo Hamilton. [To a degree, both Shuggie and Mungo’s childhood in Glasgow echo Stuart’s own.] His father dead, Mungo lives in a cramped home in a housing project with his alcoholic mother, Mo-Maw (she refuses to allow her children to address her by any form of the word mother because she feels she is too young for that), who often disappears without notice for weeks in search of male companionship and/or drink—or both. Mungo’s five-year older brother, Hamish, is a threatening, callous boy who revels in his manliness and toughness which he does not hesitate to take out on his younger brother. For Hamish, his physical strength is his sole source of respect—both for others and for himself. Jodie, the middle child who is a year-and-a-half older than Mungo, tries to hold the family together but finds herself disgusted by Mungo’s wasted love for his mother and eagerly looks forward to the day when she can leave the family and their poverty behind and make something of her life. She is the only character in the book who dares speak the truth about situations and others out loud.YOUNG MUNGO begins with the boy on a week-long fishing and camping trip arranged by Mo-Maw with two adult men, “St. Christopher” and “Gallowgate,” who she knows virtually nothing about, having met them at an AA Twelve Step Program meeting. She is convinced the experience will help her young, quiet, remote child become more “manly.” For nearly fifteen years Mungo’s innocence and reticence has been seen as a weakness and something which needs to be corrected out of fear of where it might lead. The fishing trip, however, is dreadful mistake in so many ways.To say YOUNG MUNGO is nothing short of brilliant hardly does the work justice. Stuart’s writing is all-encompassing and vivid. Descriptions of both the housing project and Glasgow itself as well as nature: the woods, wildlife, the ruins of an old castle, and the loch where Mungo and his two adult custodians camp and fish are richly on display. The author concentrates on and reveals his characters’ psychological makeup, especially Mungo’s, making the individuals real and believable. It is especially impossible to read the novel and not feel the boy’s sentiments of being utterly alone with no help available to him and not wanting to take Mungo by the hand and assist him with his pain—both the emotional and physical—he continually encounters throughout the book.The author uses Scottish dialect and words throughout the novel (which might throw some readers off until they get used to it, but most of the unfamiliar vocabulary will be distinguishable from its context). And although the feel of Scotland, especially among the less educated and poorer population permeates the novel, Stuart writes about universal themes with which every open-minded reader will be able to identify.Toxic masculinity is ever present in Hamish as well as others. As a gang leader, Hamish and his troupe find street fighting, especially fighting Catholics to be “about honour… territory… reputation…” Although most American readers are likely to associate England and Ireland as hotbeds of religious hostility, Stuart makes it clear the same heated antagonism between Catholic and Protestant was/is to be found in Scotland. Indeed, religion stands in the shadow at the foundation of much of the intolerance or lack of acceptance of those who are different, people like Mungo who gets labeled “a dirty wee poofter… a filthy little bender” as well as does an older, single, lonely neighbor of his, Chickie Calhoun, who is shunned by nearly all.Raw, unwarranted violence suddenly and repeatedly flares up in the story as it does sadly nearly everywhere in the world today. More youth than we will ever know face crushing, loveless, desperate home lives and face the same kind of intolerance much as does Mungo.The construction of YOUNG MUNGO is extremely skilled. From the early hours of the camping trip in the wild, Stuart whisks readers back four months or more to earlier events. For the remainder of the novel Stuart moves the story’s timeline back and forth, providing small revelations but never giving readers Mongo’s full story until the very end of the book. It makes for suspenseful as well as anxiety-inducing reading at times.Stuart proves himself capable of writing very lyrical and romantic prose when he turns his attention to the growing relationship between Mungo and a slightly older neighbor, James Jamieson. The similarities between the two boys are striking. James’s mother is dead and his dad is often away working on an oil rig at sea. Suffering from loneliness, James turns to raising pigeons on a rooftop doocot. The budding relationship between the two youths force both to take risks like never before and their halting, cautious approach toward each other is deftly told. There is danger not only in their budding romance being socially unacceptable, but because James is Catholic while the Hamiltons are Protestant. They are encircled by those who would destroy anything the two might create and give to each other.Stuart’s narrative will keep readers hypnotized and apprehensively awaiting the outcome of the tale to the very last page. The author’s writing is superb—far more than one would expect from most second novels. Despite the seemingly endless agonizing moments in Mungo’s life with only brief lyrical although often confusing respites with James, Stuart delivers his material without sentimentality and with occasional specks of humor. Readers will, surprisingly, finish YOUNG MUNGO engulfed in a sense of love and hope and the realization of what survival in the face of adversity really takes. YOUNG MUNGO is a novel which can change a person’s outlook on the world and their own life to the better—if the reader will permit and embrace such a possibility.

This book had a slow start, although it was probably the fact that the spoken words were all written in Scottish dialect.The telling of the story was nonetheless as powerful as I have ever read. I could see myself in bits and pieces. Good luck, Mungo!

This book is a masterpiece. Stunning beautiful, achingly brutal, goes straight through your heart. I could not put it down and found myself shouting "Nooo!" and the likes at the pages the more intense the story got, the same way you would watching an movie that had you completely drawn in. Stuart's writing and prose - the way he can bring a whole environment, culture and characters to life for you in a language that seems so his own reminds me of the unique storytelling skills of iconic greats like Toni Morrison and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I have now purchased 'Shuggie' Bain and cannot wait for Douglas Stuart to tell more stories! Highly highly recommend!

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart is a sweet/funny/sad/violent story of the coming of age of Mungo, a naïve and closeted 15-year-old Protestant boy with an embarrassing eye twitch. His world includes his alcoholic mother whom he thinks he must care for, his angry sister, his partisan thug of an older brother. His story is set in post-Thatcher Scotland in the shadow of near-by sectarian warfare. Along the way are a pair of villains straight out of Pinocchio, the Catholic boy Mungo will fall in love with, and a delightfully charming older gay man named Poor-Wee-Chickie, the town outcast to whom Mungo is drawn. The story is told in confusing parallel tracks, jumping forward and back through time, ending in a contrived and predictable way. But the language (delightful but daunting at times due to the dialect), descriptions and characters are gloriously realized, and the milieu is both intriguingly foreign and warmly familiar. Mungo learns who he is in both beautiful and horrible ways, but the charm and humanity of these Glaswegians lingers long after the story is done.

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got the two guys kissing cover yay! everything is alright 😊👌🏽 can't wait to read it !!!

This book was certainly not an easy read but absolutely worth it. You have to be quite resistent, though, as horrible things are happening to the protagonist and there's nothing you can do but helplessly follow his journey to hell and back. It's a wonderful, tender love story at the same time.It's one of those books that will stay with me for a long time. I detected an inconsistency in the plot and some of the story's events I found a little hard to believe (as in, would it even be possible/likely to have happened this way?), but neither of these things stopped me from getting very invested in the book. Douglas Stuart is a master storyteller and I will absolutely read everything he's gonna publish from now on.

It's taken me a few days until I felt like I had processed Young Mungo enough to leave a review that would do it justice. This is a book that I know will stay with me for a very long time.To start with, Stuart is an exceptional writer. Everything he expressed was nuanced, sparse, and coated in heart. It's an unflinching look at poverty in Glasgow in the 90s - yet this raw, gritty and unflinching story is never gratuitous or vulgar.Young Mungo is full to the brim with pain and love, two emotions that the protagonist will spend a lifetime trying to separate. At times it was difficult to read, there are some harrowing violent and abusive scenes, but ultimately it's a book about love, family, and self-discovery. As much for himself as those around him who are destined to never change.I haven't read Stuart's Booker Prize-winning debut - Shuggie Bain - and perhaps had I started with that I may have been less impressed with Young Mungo (it appears Stuart has focussed on similar themes with both books, but taken this one to a more gruesome level).All I know is that this is a talented writer who, through his spectacular storytelling, was able to drag me through the streets of 90s Glasgow and turn my head toward its darkest side. I couldn't look away - and now I'll never stop thinking about what I saw.

I am a huge fan of "Shuggie Bain", yet I enjoyed reading "Young Mungo" even more. I am definitely smitten with Douglas Stuart's style and delicacy. Looking forward to the tv series!