Young Mungo: Book review

Author: Douglas Stuart

The book starts with a tensed air of abusiveness when Mungo is left with two strangers to pass his weekend. Like when you cross the pavement in a crowded place, trying to save your bosom from the elbows of pervert people, scanning everyone coming towards your direction as pervert or safe… Mungo judges these men for traces of abuse and he needs to come to a conclusion. Time goes on and Mungo wonders how long he needs to scan them.

The chapters run side by side with two close timelines- one before the trip with the strangers, another during the trip. Mungo, our young protagonist, comes from the tenements of the East side of Glasgow. Mungo is raised by an alcoholic mother in a tenement flat where the father didn’t come home after one of his gang fights where he was finished. The youngest of Mo-Maw’s three children. Sibling of the dead scary Ha-Ha (Hamish) and our dead nice Jodie. The family is as diverse as it can get. One alcoholic, one street fighter, one dreams to study Biology in the university and get away as far as from the East end, and our Mungo- torn between his many worlds.

Mungo met Tattie-bogle, the other personality in her mother when he was too young. When he is not yet done receiving the childhood affection one expects from their parents. Probably that's why he never grows up. He wouldn't man up, he would care about the nonsense of his mother, be her comfort zone whenever she needed- be the parent to his own mother…

Stuart plays with the Glaswegian accent like a pro. Like one of my colleagues said, it’s a feature in his book.

…he occasionally spoke in the Queen’s English - not hame but home, not didnae but did not - and that it slipped out of him when he was tired. He had a proud mother and a working father who still lived at home. The other teased him for it. Ha-Ha’s voice boomed over the gravel. “Haw Prince Charles! Can ah bring ye a cup o’ tea? Ya fuckin poofter.”

Stuart’s mothers are alcoholic, young and hungry for love. They became mothers before their girlhood dreams were fulfilled. And probably that’s the reason they can’t move on to be a full time mother. They deserve their own novels!

If you read the author’s former book “Shuggie Bain”, you would notice the comparison that comes in your brain. The settings are more or less similar. Glasgow’s working class, black hackneys, night shifts, coins rattling in an electricity meter, old tenements and lots and lots of liquor.

My copy got 19 bookmarks and many good reasons to be re-read. Only reason to not like Young Mungo enough would be- you liked Shuggie Bain even more!