We were impatiently awaiting this second novel by the Scottish Douglas Stuart. And despite the bar he set high with Shuggie Bath (his first title), Mungo manages to produce the same tragic and irresistible enchantment that makes his books unforgettable stories.
Douglas Stuart’s Glasgow is light years away from the Victorian opulence of the city’s west. We are here in the East End of the 1990s, a district undermined by unemployment left by the reforms of Margaret Thatcher during the previous decade; where gang wars between young Catholics and Protestants are Saturday night mass, and stabbings draw that famous “Glasgow smile” that has long given the city its bad reputation.
It is in the midst of this violence that Mungo grows up, a lonely 15-year-old whose gentleness disturbs the other boys – especially his older brother, who is the leader of a gang of young Protestant delinquents. His mother, who has been raising her three children alone since the death of their father, is the spitting image of that of Shuggie Bath : absent, alcoholic and terribly egocentric. Despite everything, Mungo devotes an unconditional adoration to him.
When he falls in love with a young Catholic, he is forced to hide their relationship – condemnable from all points of view because of their difference in religion and the prevailing homophobia. But their secret will not last long and when his mother discovers the pot of roses, she decides to send him for a weekend of fishing in the company of two strangers he met at his meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, supposedly to “in make a man”.
This lochside getaway quickly turns into a nightmare. Douglas Stuart alternately recounts the events of that fateful weekend and the months leading up to it, creating a growing tension that has us devouring the last hundred pages in one go. Only downside to note: the translation of the dialogues in a slang which sometimes makes them difficult to understand. But the story is so worth it that you end up overcoming this discomfort and getting caught up in the plot. It only remains to hope that the writer will continue his momentum and continue to half open this window on a city and an environment of which he has become one of the most talented storytellers.
Mungo
Douglas Stuart (translated from English by Charles Bonnot)
World
480 pages