The writer of a successful first novel – and they don’t come much more successful than Douglas Stuart’s Booker-winning Shuggie Bain – has two choices when it comes to the follow-up. Either they seek to prove their range with something entirely different, or they capitalise on that early success, giving readers more of what pleased them first time around. 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. It turns around the same basic friction: a young man growing up in grinding poverty who, because of talent, temperament and sexuality, is particularly ill-suited to the hard-edged world of the Glasgow schemes.
If Young Mungo doesn’t raise the same immediate thrill as Shuggie Bain – the sense of discovering a new voice of coruscating brilliance – there’s a richer, deeper pleasure to be gleaned here. Young Mungo is a finer novel than its predecessor, offering many of the same pleasures, but with a more sure-footed approach to narrative and a finer grasp of prose. There are sentences here that gleam and shimmer, demanding to be read and reread for their beauty and their truth.
Mungo Hamilton is the youngest of three children. They live on a Glasgow scheme rife with sectarian violence between the “Prodders” and the “Fenians”. The Hamiltons are Protestants, with the oldest brother, Hamish (known as “Ha-Ha”), the leader of a gang of teenagers who rob and intimidate the local Catholics. Jodie, Mungo’s sister, is a bright and ambitious young woman in a miserable and manipulative relationship with a teacher at school. Mungo is awkward, handsome and sensitive, with a tic and a patch of raw skin on one cheek. With their father long dead, all children live in the shadow of their mother, Mo-Maw, an alcoholic with the same mixture of charm, compassion and cruelty as Agnes from the previous book. Where Agnes sat at the heart of Shuggie Bain, Mo-Maw is notable here largely by her absence: she disappears for weeks at a time, leaving Ha-Ha and Jodie as the imperfect parents to the fragile Mungo. When she does appear, it is with tales of her pursuit of a new husband, or deep in her cups, when she becomes what the children call “Tattie-Bogle” – a “heartless, shambling scarecrow”.
Young Mungo operates a dual narrative, with chapters alternating between a fishing trip that Mungo takes with two friends of his mother and a more expansive history of Mungo’s life leading up to this point. In the wake of an event whose facts become clear over the course of the novel, Mungo has been packed off by his mother with two men she’d met at Alcoholics Anonymous. We soon learn that the men – “St” Christopher and the younger, more sinister Gallowgate – have been in jail. Now they are here in the glens, “as near tae heaven as ye can get on three buses,” as one of the men puts it.
The chapters beside the loch are dark and drenched with foreboding. The men are drunk by the time they arrive and as they grow drunker our fear for the 15-year-old boy sent into the wilderness with them mounts to an almost intolerable pitch. It’s a relief when we drop back into the past, although here, too, things are far from cheery. What struck readers most about Shuggie Bain was the way that Stuart managed to redeem situations of almost unimaginable awfulness through small moments of familial connection, through scenes in the home that managed to be deeply stirring without ever straying into sentimentality. In Young Mungo, again, he brilliantly summons a family, brings them to vivid life on the page, makes us love them for all their faults.
There is also romance. Mungo comes upon a “doocot” (dovecot) one day while out sketching in an area of scrub beside the tenements. There he meets James, a Catholic boy who lives on the next street over. James is like no one else he’s met: gentle and softly spoken and obsessed by his doves. Mungo begins visiting the doocot more regularly, then going to stay at James’s house. What begins with pinky fingers locked in the dark of a bedroom grows into something more serious, a love that challenges two of the powerful taboos of the schemes: that men should be violent and violently heterosexual, and that Protestants shouldn’t mix with Catholics.
I kept thinking of Alan Hollinghurst when I was reading Young Mungo. Hollinghurst, of course, writes of a different world and with a different kind of poetry in his prose, but there is so much here that recalls him at his best. The way that Stuart builds towards exquisite set pieces, moments in time that take on an almost visionary aspect; the powerful and evocative descriptions of sex and nature in language that soars without ever feeling forced or purple; the manner in which he binds you into the lives of his characters, making even the most brutal and self-interested members of the family somehow not only forgivable, but lovable.
I sobbed my way through Shuggie Bain and sobbed again as Young Mungo made its way towards an ending whose inevitability only serves to heighten its tragedy. If the first novel announced Stuart as a novelist of great promise, this confirms him as a prodigious talent.
• Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart is published by Pan Macmillan (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
