Glasgow, the most populous city in Scotland, a working-class city bled by the Thatcher years, was not leading the way at the turn of the 1990s.
Maureen, a thirty-four-year-old mother of three, an alcoholic driven by her urges and an unstable love life, doesn’t like her teenagers calling her mum in public. It also happens to disappear for days or even weeks.
Fifteen-year-old Mungo and his big sister, Jodie, have to take care of themselves most of the time. Their father was stabbed to death when Mo-Maw was pregnant with Mungo. Hamish, known as Ha Ha, the eldest of the Hamiltons – whom everyone hates – is linked to a criminal street gang that only thinks of fighting with the “Fenians”, the Catholics.
We may remember that with Shuggie Bath (Globe, 2021), an autobiographical story, Douglas Stuart, born in Glasgow in 1976, took us to the heart of a poor district of Glasgow in the 1980s – alcoholism, poverty and unworthy motherhood. With more force still, Mungohis second novel, plunges us back into this colorful and unvarnished universe.
A sweet and kind boy, “willing to do anything to make others feel better”, Mungo takes his first name from the patron saint of Glasgow. Everything in the boy’s life was connected with their unworthy mother. Despite this, Mungo was “his confidant, his maid, his courier. He was her flattering mirror, her teenage diary, her electric blanket and her doormat. He was her best friend, the dog she never took out, her greatest love affair. He was his hint of joy on dreary days, the only laughter in his audience”.
Senses awakened, the teenager will develop a new and disturbing friendship with a Catholic neighbor of his age, James, whose mother is dead and whose father, absent most of the time, works on an oil platform off the coast of Scotland. Driven by his difference, a homosexuality that can only stigmatize him in this universe of facade virility, James, if only to survive, thinks only of running away and starting his life again far from here.
After being informed of a “suspicious” rapprochement between the two teenagers, Mungo’s mother will entrust her son to two men she barely knows, whom she met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. During a weekend of fishing, the two drunkards will take care of the teenager. For Mungo, who had never left Glasgow, who had never seen a lake or a ruined castle anywhere other than on a box of biscuits, there will be a before and an after.
“For men’s activities. You are going to become a man,” his mother promises him. Without being able to imagine that she will also make him both a victim and the mastermind of her own life.
A tragic and violent book on several counts, a cross between Confessions of a Mask And Issuancea story of a conversion therapy gone wrong, both dark and bright, Mungo is also a story of accelerated emancipation. Poignant and impossible to forget.