Young Mungo by Douglass Stuart

Monday, May 2, 2022--San Antonio

Young Mungo by Douglass Stuart has gotten rave reviews this spring.  The same author wrote Shuggy Bain which also got rave reviews and won the Booker Prize a couple of years ago.  Both books deal with poor families in Glassgow.  And both books are told in the words of a young gay boy--the previous book by a boy who is a child and the latter by a boy who is an adolescent (14 going on 15, required to stay in school until he is 16, and faces the constant danger of being taken away from his siblings if the government learns their mother is not living in the home with them).  But there are differences.  The earlier book was about the hardships of being poor which are mostly caused by having a mother who makes bad choices in her attempts to try to improve their lives; the sexuality of the storyteller is background information.  There is still a mother making bad choices in Young Mungo, but she is mostly an absent mother who leaves her 3 children to fend for themselves, and the storyteller's gay sexuality is a major factor in this story as he "discovers" he is gay (in addition to being sweet and sensitive), as he maneuvers around the expectations of his older brother who runs a protestant gang and expects his brother to participate in their violent and illegal activities, and as he deals with his need to be mothered which is provided mostly by his slightly older sister (about to turn 16) who feels she must deal with all the problems caused by the absent alcoholic mother who feels she should not be stuck with children since she is still young and desires male companionship and freedom to live her own life.  Set in the 1980s following the closing of the shipbuilding yard and the mines during the Margaret Thatcher period, life is hard for everyone in the slums in the east end of town.  Plus, there are religious rivalries between the protestants and the Catholics like in Northern Ireland.  Added to that, being a "poofter" is socially unacceptable and is like having a target on one's back for anyone to abuse you at any time, so a young gay boy must hide his sexuality and try to live a straight life or face a miserable life of hiding from society and face being bullied and beaten regularly.  Mungo finds love and does not want to live a false life, and the decisions made by members of his family because of it put him in grave danger alone among strangers and later when discovered with his boyfriend.  The book is quite depressing, but not in a way that it is a turnoff for the reader, since there are joys, too, and hope. I gave the book 5 stars out of 5.