Book review: ‘Young Mungo’ is a disturbing tale of hypermasculinity and breakability of a queer body

'Young Mungo' is Douglas Stuart's second novel, after his Booker Prize-winning 'Shuggie Bain'. (Representational image: Jordan McDonald via Unsplash)

Trigger warning: Mention of sexual assault, queer slurs, and murder

Booker Prize-winning author Douglas Stuart’s second novel Young Mungo (Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, 2022) can be triggering for many queer people to read. It is many, many stories in one.

An array of phenomena operates in the literary world-building of Stuart. There’s a hint of how traumatic growing up years can mess up caregiving for a person. Of how gender-based violence is normalised and accepted to a point that when one tries to break the cycle, the help is outrightly rejected. And because a variety of issues play out, as they should in society, it’s possible for anyone to have a completely different reading of it, but personally, Young Mungo shook me on many levels.

The story is set in Glasgow. The people in the book are largely working-class, going about their everyday lives. They conform to heteropatriarchal notions of gender, and there’s zero tolerance towards anyone who doesn’t conform to them.

Mungo and James are non-conformers, and they must pay the price for it.

In the book, the queer body is hyper-visible. It is not only at its most vulnerable but also most breakable point. There are only two choices to pick from: either mould this body towards self-destruction or ignite in it a passion towards “masculine pursuits”.

Fifteen-year-old Mungo’s mother, Maureen, picks the latter, sending him to western Scotland’s lowlands to learn how to fish with two absolute strangers. These men – Gallowgate and St Christopher – are tasked with making a “man” out of Mungo. And how do they do it? By raping him, because they think it’s all part of growing up. Additionally, they reason that it’s difficult to find women to hook up with. And this boy, who was very excited on his way towards an adventurous ride, appreciating the “newness” of the experiences along the way, is now left disturbed, shaken, and broken, with nowhere to go.

Mungo’s family barely holds together: the matriarch has a drinking problem. At the start of the book, we are also told that she wants to start prioritising her life while she’s still young. James’ father, Mr Jamieson, is a prosperous man. He works in oilfields and “knows” about his son. He helps his son build a doocot right after his wife’s funeral, to “teach James discipline and how to care”, and also because “then they didn’t have to talk about his mother”. Mungo’s elder brother, Hamish (aka Ha-Ha), feels like he has failed Mungo because he hasn’t told him “how to be a man.”

It’s interesting to see hypermasculinity at play here. Not only do these men – young or old – have an inherent saviour complex, but they also plan a clear escape from their assumed “responsibilities”.

Stuart’s prose lays bare even socio-political complexities in a dialogic manner. It’s classic writing: it shows, doesn’t tell. And doesn’t box characters into easily likeable or hateful creatures either. Your affection towards a character can change in an instant. For example: While you happen to like Jodie – Mungo’s elder sister – for being her brother’s support system and caregiver, finding her convinced that her brother would catch AIDS because he’s “deviant” and is regularly hooking up with a Fenian feels like a not-entirely-impossible-but-unlikely revelation about this liberal young woman.

But a close reading will help you tie everything back to the heteropatriarchal, unaccommodating, and limited imagination of the world.

Be it Maureen, Jodie, her married lover Mr Gillespie, Mr Campbell and his wife, Hamish, Mungo, James, his father … they are all part of the same system. Their actions and reactions, however devastating and unbearable, are explainable if we arrange the most important pieces of the puzzle – masculinity and the politics of pride – in order.

Not that the situations and motivations that Stuart engineers in the book appear familiar, but because they’re presented with a raw abandon that they hit the hardest, gutting you to almost put this book down to catch your breath. Reading Young Mungo makes you wait eagerly for Stuart’s next.