Scala Radio Book Club: Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
A page-turning second novel from the Booker-prize winning author of Shuggie Bain
Last updated 15th Aug 2022
In the Scala Radio Book Club this week (Thursday 14th April 2022), Mark Forrest chatted to Scottish-American Fashion Designer and Booker-prize winning author, Douglas Stuart, on his brand-new novel Young Mungo.
Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in the hyper-masculine and violently sectarian world of Glasgow's housing estates. They should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all, and yet they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they find themselves falling in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, and Mungo works especially hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold.
But the threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable. When Mungo's mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.
Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the push and pull of family, the violence faced by so many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.
Mark began the interview asking about the two narratives that construct the novel. ‘A major event in Mungo's life separates these two narratives in the book. When you were constructing these stories, did you write one then the other, or did you flit backwards and forwards between the two?’
‘Yeah, one of the narratives happens in Glasgow and the other one that happens in the May after, takes place in the north of Scotland, where Mungo goes on a camping weekend with two very likely lads,’ said Douglas. ‘But it's a very violent, dark weekend. He goes to learn some masculine pursuits, but he's challenged in ways that he had no ability to foresee. I wrote that part first actually, almost as a continuous narrative, because there's so much tension there, there's so much to unpack. There's so much pressure on the central character. Then I took more time and actually wove the narrative of Mungo's home life back in Glasgow, where you see him interact with his family and his community and you see him fall in love with this other young man. And that's really the heart of the book.’
Mark asked, ‘Readers of Shuggie Bain, your first book, will be familiar with the setting of a teenage boy, growing up gay in an environment where it's completely unacceptable, devoted to an alcoholic mother. You would have thought, long and hard about returning to this place. Why did you decide, even though it's a decade later, to go back?’
‘Because it's the heart of me,’ said Douglas. ‘It's not like I cast my eye around the world and think, “What will I write about now?” This doesn't feel like other people to me or another story. There is a woman who is suffering with addiction at the heart of both novels, but the characters are so vastly different. Often when someone suffers with addiction, we reduce them to their illness rather than see them as all the person that they are.’
Mark then turned his attention to how Douglas became a novelist. ‘You were the Senior Director in fashion for Banana Republic in New York, which is what you were doing when you wrote your first novel, Shuggie Bain. When you were already so successful in the field of fashion, where did the urge come from to strive for success in writing?’
‘Well, I don't think I was looking for success. I was looking for an ability to express myself, to process some things from my childhood that I hadn't necessarily thought about or interrogated. I think oftentimes as men, if we go through trauma, we're asked to keep it very quiet and very silent. So in my thirties, I used my writing as a way to really interrogate myself and to think about the situations that I would find myself in.’
Mark finished the interview saying, ‘I must ask you the picture on the front. How did you come across it?’
‘It's a Wolfgang Tillmans photograph, and it meant so much to me when I first saw it. It's quite a provocative photograph, and at the same time it's very ordinary. It's just two lads kissing, and they're fully dressed, and they're a little bit sweaty. But it's a very honest photo. It was a photo that for me celebrates love. When it sometimes appeared in art galleries, it was met with so much hate. It was torn from the walls and people really thought it was quite depraved. Of course, it isn't. It's a very honest, lovely photograph. I felt if I was writing about a celebration of love and young Mungo, but also the hate that the young men face, then this photo said so much to me.’
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