title: Young Mungo by: Stuart, Douglas published: 2022 read: preview

After having read Shuggy Bain, a year or two ago, I was fearful starting this one.  Again a drunk mother, 3 kids, one of whom drifts off in violence, one who tries to keep the bunch together, and one who drifts off – previously Shuggy, here Mungo.  So, what else could be new in yet another novel about Glasgow in the Thatcher era?

Well, everything.  Forget the previous book, this is the same yet totally different.  Mungo grows up towards a homosexual relationship, and is abused by just about everyone because of it.

So, Mungo is like 14 or so, and lives with his sister and mum.  Mum is a drunk, and disappears early to live with her boyfriend, not informing the kids.  They cope, later meet her by chance and confront her.  Mungo falls in love with a boy a few streets away, and his soft behaviour is noticed by his mother and abusive brother.  They send him on a trip to a Loch with two child-abusive ex convicts – it doesn’t go well, of course.  Nor does his love.  

Young Mungo is a sad book, playing in a Britain that I’ve seen parts of, and can perhaps understand a bit.  It puts the being trapped in poverty, despair, hopelessness in such a clear, central position that one does not love the characters, but at least feels with them, or understands their desperate decisions.  Whether it is the violence that Mungo sometimes needs to revert to; whether his brother who saves him in the end – family over all? – whether his mother who decides to forget her children to pursue her own life.