When there was fighting at the house opposite ours in Makhanda, we called it “free bioscope”. The siblings, parents, uncles and aunts were constantly at loggerheads. One of the brothers had a birthmark on his face. I had always imagined, as a kid, that it was not a birthmark, but the result of hot water thrown at him, just another scene from the many domestic violence shows they were putting on.
Domestic violence was as much the mother tongue of my community as Afrikaans was. If I close my eyes now and think back to my childhood, happy faces and laughter mix with a cacophony of domestic violence sounds and scenes in the whole area. Just as in Young Mungo.
Any serious sociological analysis about gender relations and domestic violence must also implicate economic systems that contribute to the making of violent masculinities, including men with self-destructive impressions of their personal value, which in turn manifests as violence
Young Mungo is the second novel by brilliant Douglas Stuart — who gifted the world his painfully beautiful and deservedly Booker Prize-winning first book Shuggie Bain — and he has produced literary magic again. The potential trouble with a stunning debut is that you might be paralysed by the thought of what to do next. Quit while you're ahead? Shuggie Bain remains compulsory reading the world over. And yet, despite its moral and aesthetic excellence, I daresay Young Mungo is an even greater work of art. It spans countless themes including a sensitive but daringly honest examination of domestic violence, religious bigotry, class warfare, internalised oppression, homophobia, sexual violence, banal gratuitous violence, familial love, familial hate, alcoholism, patriarchy and still so much more.
Remarkably, it is not overwritten despite the thematic range, and not too ambitious despite the multiple storylines. It is a well constructed and compelling, if sometimes overbearingly violent and sad, novel from beginning till the end of nearly 400 bittersweet pages. I was not surprised when an acquaintance, a South African with a deep appreciation for literature and justice, wrote to me privately and said, “Sadly I rarely cry. Shuggie Bain had that effect. Now Young Mungo has done the same. Douglas Stuart is such an incredibly evocative writer.”
Young Mungo is set in Glasgow and tells the story of Mungo and his family. They are a working-class Protestant family, with plenty of trials and tribulations. His mom, Maureen, is an alcoholic. His brother, Hamish, several years older, is addicted to violence, and his sister Jodie, desperate to escape the horror of their circumstances, is forced to play mother to her younger brother Mungo because Maureen is never around. In one of the few scenes when they get a respite from violence at their own home, the two younger siblings try to come to the rescue of their neighbour Mrs Campbell, who is audibly being beaten up by Mr Campbell. They go over to the neighbours in the hope of distracting Mr Campbell so that his poor wife might get a break from being attacked by the violent man. The scene plays out as follows:
Jodie exhaled sharply through her nose. “Well, I think it's a bloody disgrace the way men get worked up over the football. What a bunch of sore losers.” Mrs Campbell twisted free of Jodie's grip. She climbed a few steps and then she turned. She looked confused. “No. That's no it at all.” “It is. The football is just an excuse for the men to drink and fight and get all their anger out.”
“Ye're too wee to know anything about men and their anger.” Mrs Campbell took her damaged arm from her pinny pocket, she stroked it, cradled it as though it were a poorly lamb. “Every day for twenty-seven year that man went to the shipyards. Girders as big as corporation buses flying around on chains, a ton weight of steel dangling above his heid, and at any minute it could've dropped and kil't him, and left me wi' nothin' but three weans and a divot in the mattress. And he knew it. Aw those men knew it.” Jodie set her jaw. “Then he should be relieved that it's all behind him.”
The woman's gaze travelled out the colourful window and into back middens. She was bathed in a patchwork of green and blue light, which made her appear sectioned off like the butcher's guide to the very best cuts of meat. “Some of the men used to drink six, seven pints of lager at lunchtime. They only had an hour and yet they'd neck one pint after the other. Ah heard the barman would spend all morning pouring them, and he would line hunners, thousands of pints up along the bar so the men could just grab it and drown themselves as the lunch bell rang. Oh and they ran for it! Does that sound lik happy men to you?”
“I'm sorry, Missus Campbell. But I know plenty of unhappy people. That's no excuse for your...” Jodie nodded at the woman's face. It was like she couldn't bring herself to say it out loud.
Mungo watched as Mrs Campbell stared at and then through Jodie. Nobody ever looked at Jodie as if she was stupid, as if she was a know nothing, and it surprised Mungo to see it now.
“When our Graham would come home, when we would sit down at dinnertime, ah would ask him how his day was, and all he would say wis 'Aye, fine. Aye, no bad. Aye, it was awright.' So ah would just start wittering on about so-and-so and her new fancy man, or how Mary McClure didnae like the new minister.” Mrs Campbell shuddered as she sighed. “Imagine all that fear and disappointment clogged up in there, and nobody stopped to ask him about it, to ask if he was happy in his life, if he was coping. None of the men could tell ye how they really felt, because if they did, they would weep, and this fuckin’ city is damp enough.”
It is tempting to judge Mrs Campbell, dismissing her as excusing male violence, as being in the grip of Stockholm syndrome. But that feels wrong. Stuart is here displaying the moral complexity of his — of our — society. We can simultaneously judge men for performing unhealthy masculinities and dig up the roots of it. Too many of our moms, aunts, sisters, cousins, colleagues, and neighbours, are Mrs Campbell — victims and survivors of the patriarchy who are required to be resilient and compassionate towards the bastard perpetrator. This is why Jodie abandons her robust critique of the older woman. More tragically is the reality that too many of us men are, in turn, Mr Campbell.
What is also noteworthy in this scene, and a theme that recurs in the novel, is an understanding of the class subjugation that leaves many men feeling like mere cogs in the capitalist system. That, again, does not justify domestic violence. What it does do, however, is demonstrate an appreciation on Stuart’s part that any serious sociological analysis about gender relations and domestic violence must also implicate economic systems that contribute to the making of violent masculinities, including men with self-destructive impressions of their personal value, which in turn manifests as violence directed at anyone and anything around them.
I loved my mom. She passed away while I was a graduate student abroad, and it shook me to hear my poor dad on the other end of the phone line breaking the news to me. I have avoided trying to figure out if I ever recovered from this event. I often write about mom, and I also often wonder if I do her justice in my occasional references to her because I seem to recall the worst about her, and don’t celebrate her amazing qualities often enough, like her Sunday roast that was second to none, or her incredible pride she took in everything I did, whether it be playing the recorder or simply looking good in my suit that had been made by my Aunt Hazel for my first holy communion. I loved her the way Mungo loved his Mo-Maw. Mungo and I have something in common. My mom, like his, had a drinking habit though. It is hard to write about that without feeling like you are speaking bad about mom. But it is the truth. Like Mungo, I never quite knew what the drink would do to mom, and this is why a simple passage from Young Mungo resonated so deeply with my younger self, a scene in which Mungo is walking with Mo-Maw, not sure whether she would tire quickly or not, having drank quite a bit that day:
She had oriented their walk towards the city centre; maybe the casino would still be open, or the penny puggies under Central Station. Tattie-bogle liked lights. He had hoped she would lose heart, but she didn't. The drink could flatten her or give her a peculiar stamina. The terror lay in the fact he never knew which it would be.
But he felt safe with his mom, and she found him more forgiving of her sins than Hamish and Jodie did. What Maureen had in common, sadly, with her other two children, is homophobia, and as Mungo discovers his sexuality, home becomes an unsafe space for a queer teenage boy. Stuart, in his mastery, complicates the journey Mungo walks, including delicate lust and teen love for another boy, with a sumptuous description of their first kiss:
Mungo looked both up and down the hill, and then he kissed James quickly on the lips. It was like hot buttered toast when you were starving. It was that good.
Sadly, this innocence gets violently mangled by Hamish, who insists his brother join a gang of lads who fight Catholics, even while unable to justify it — “Honestly, ah don't really know. But it's fuckin' good fun.” — and implicating Mungo in religious intolerance that gets handed down by one generation to another.
In the end, the most horrific parts of the plot should not be summated in a review essay but left to be discovered by the reader. It is shocking, but strangely rewarding, despite the emotional rollercoaster. Suffice to say, I kept playing tracks such as Luka by Suzanne Vega and Behind the Wall by Tracy Chapman on repeat long after I had finished this novel and shed tears like many readers have. I also thought of how some of my favourite literary works like Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams and The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera almost seem tame next to Young Mungo, such is the violent drama the characters are ensnared in. Mungo, Maureen’s little boy, seems so innocent when we meet him, but by the end of the story, once you have been inside his head and heart and walked many miles with him in scary forests, the quiet violence of Mungo will leave you unable to know what to make of life as such, searching for meaning. Young Mungo is a novel you will want to read again but knowing that doing so would be emotionally imprudent.
— McKaiser is a contributor and analyst for TimesLIVE
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