Mungo and the Picture Book Pirates

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Adding to their adversity is Mungo’s turbulent home life, where he fields abuse from his mother and observes his brother’s actions as the leader of a local gang.

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart | Goodreads

Jodie gives Mungo an Ellsworth Kelly catalogue and he flicks through, and appears to note the “supremely controlled line drawings”, the rectangles that “collided to make patterns and depth of tone from their layered repetition”. Mungo cannot tell which would be considered the worse betrayal in the eyes of his fearsome brother Hamish – that James is male or that he’s “Fenian”. Okay, maybe my expectations were too high after Shuggie Bain, but while Stuart still excells at atmospheric writing and nuanced dialogue, the plot is frustratingly predictable and the main character is simply another version of Shuggie, but a bit older, so the aspect of him realizing that he is gay becomes central to the story. They might have stayed locked in that position all night, but at that moment footsteps sounded on the street. As difficult as Mungo's situation is, the understanding that he doesn’t belong is ultimately what gives him the vantage to see his situation for what it is.

Stuart has opted for the latter course: Young Mungo is set in the same world and at more-or-less the same time as Shuggie Bain. BuzzFeed “Few novels are as gutsy and gut-wrenching as Young Mungoin its depiction of a teenage boy who finds love amid family dysfunction, community conflict and the truly terrible predations of adults. The motion before you tonight is, “This house believes that slavery should be abolished from the face of the Earth”. They explore their teenaged awkward bodies, they try to figure out the HUGE new emotions, and they face up to the impossibility of being openly gay in their world. It is merely a name for what men practice wherever they are, whether in Virginia or Guinea or Manchester.

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart | Waterstones

After the extraordinary success of Shuggie Bain, his second novel, Young Mungo, is another beautiful and moving book, a gay Romeo and Juliet set in the brutal world of Glasgow’s housing estates. It's a joy to watch, in real time, as Douglas Stuart takes his place as one of the greats of Scottish literature.Yet despite the multifarious frustrations, and even at its most overexplicit and overwrought, Young Mungo is the work of a true novelist. You know perfectly well that despite our government’s strenuous efforts, traders continue to flout the law by smuggling blacks out of Africa under the very noses of the Royal Navy. There are sentences here that gleam and shimmer, demanding to be read and reread for their beauty and their truth .