It is expected that a novel like Young Mungo might provide solace to anyone feeling such fear and alienation in today’s slightly more accepting world. One would hope that these challenges are less prevalent nowadays for gay youth, but no doubt they still exist in many places.

Mungo goes through life making “himself as small as possible” because the smaller he is, the less likely he is to draw attention to himself, another familiar experience for many gay teenagers. Stuart perfectly captures an experience unique to gay people growing up in a time lacking in understanding: the feeling of finding love that is forbidden and must be hidden from even those closest to us for fear of being found out as something wrong, something dirty, something we are let to believe we shouldn’t be.

We meet Poor-Wee-Chickie, “a bachelor” ridiculed and shunned by the local community, yet he is one of the few characters to show selfless kindness to Mungo. Like many boys like him at the time, Mungo feels that there is something inherently wrong with him, but he feels a magnetic draw to James despite his hesitation. We join Mungo on his journey of discovery as he meets the flaxen-haired pigeon-keeper, James. Whilst Stuart’s two novels tell stories that are very much set in the same world - a world that he paints as vividly as he does grittily - Young Mungo is, at its heart, a love story, remembered throughout a harrowing and transformative fishing trip in northern Scotland, on which teenage Mungo is sent with two acquaintances of his mother to make a man of him after all, “there was nothing more shameful than being a poofter powerless, soft as a woman.”Ī lack of wider acceptance of homosexuality is a prevalent theme in Young Mungo. Whilst politics and the effects of Thatcherism were more explicitly explored in Shuggie Bain, Young Mungo tells a more intimate coming-of-age story that of Mungo Hamilton, brother of the intellectually promising Jodie, and troubled bully, Hamish Hamilton, and son of Mo-Maw, who struggles with alcohol and self-esteem affect her ability to be the mother her son needs. Both books follow young male protagonists doing their best to survive under challenging circumstances amongst troubled families in working-class Glaswegian communities hard hit by the effects of Margaret Thatcher’s policies.

Young Mungo sees Douglas Stuart exploring similar themes to that of his first novel, 2020 Booker Prize winner Shuggie Bain.

Review young mungo