Mungo and the Picture Book Pirates

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His mother, Maureen, is known as Mo-Maw, short for Monday-Thursday Maureen, which is her Alcoholic Anonymous name. She met these two men at AA, and like them, she still drinks all the time. Gallowgate is a former inmate of Barlinnie Prison, while St Christopher is no saint, just Sunday-Thursday Christopher.

Mungobooks - AbeBooks - Poole Mungobooks - AbeBooks - Poole

Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in a hyper-masculine world. They are caught between two of Glasgow’s housing estates, where young working-class men divide themselves along sectarian lines, and fight territorial battles for the sake of reputation. At that time this book was described by some interviewers as a same-sex take on Romeo and Juliet – a tale of love across a sectarian and territorial gang divide (which I have to say sounded like a “West Side Story” and made my worried about its originality) but was I think better described by the author as being about “the pressure we put on working-class boys to ‘man-up’ and all the terrible things and violence that can flow from that.”. I sobbed my way through Shuggie Bain and sobbed again as Young Mungo made its way towards an ending whose inevitability only serves to heighten its tragedy. If the first novel announced Stuart as a novelist of great promise, this confirms him as a prodigious talent. with some of the most gorgeous writing and intimate storytelling there ever was. From tender to bloodthirsty brutal…..Born in Glasgow, Scotland, after receiving his MA from the Royal College of Art in London, he has lived and worked in New York City. In a Nutshell: Depending on what you like as a reader, you are either going to love this book or hate it. Very few will fall in the in-between range. Unfortunately for me, I hated it. The audiobook made matters worse.

Book Review: ‘Young Mungo,’ by Douglas Stuart - The New York Book Review: ‘Young Mungo,’ by Douglas Stuart - The New York

Mungo is not Shuggie Bain, grown up, although Mungo’s mother is an alcoholic and they live in Glasgow. Mungo is the youngest of Maureen’s three kids, taller than both his violent older brother Hamish and his loving, caring sister, Jodie. He is also more appealingly attractive, the kind of lad that women want to mother. The boys become friends, and when Mungo later realises James is Catholic, he keeps it secret. Both boys are lonely, neither has had any real friends, and as they gradually grow closer, they begin to feel a romantic attachment which takes them both by surprise. Religion plays a role in both with interestingly mothers that seem far less concerned at crossing the religious divide than those around them. The man was trembling slightly. Years spent hiding from daylight in dark pubs had given him the nervous reactions of a whippet pushed out into the snow, and he had the small darting eyes and long twitching limbs of a mistreated dog." The new book by the author of Shuggie Bain! As gritty and heartbreaking, but also gorgeously showing the sweet love between two Glaswegian boys.The blurb makes it seem like it's a forbidden love story between a Protestant boy and a Catholic one. This forms just a small part of the storyline. The main story is more like a bildungsroman, but not in a good way. Mungo and Jamie fall for each other, despite what they know will be the reaction of their families (particularly Mungo’s brother and Jamie’s Dad) – reactions coloured by both sectarianism and anti-homosexuality. They waited, calling encouragement to each other. None of them wanted to suffer the same fate as Manners, but they did not want to look weak. At last the one with the poker stepped forward. But in a fiercely violent masculine and heterosexual working class world, one ironically made only the fiercer and more violent by the otherwise emasculating impact of the Thatcher-era cuts on the heavy industry that built the culture: Mungo’s even bigger struggle is to somehow conform to the conventions and expectations of others (not the least Ha-Ha), when he himself is sensitive, artistic, nervous (with a facial tic which may be Tourette’s and a number of other compulsive behaviours) and increasingly aware of his attraction to his own sex. There are some great ideas in the book, like naming the protagonist after the patron saint of Glasgow ( Saint Kentigern, known as Saint Mungo) who restored a robin to life after his classmates had killed it, and then letting James run a dovecot, and there are also some twists, but argh, this just isn't enough. Strangely, the book reminded me of Hanya Yanagihara, as Stuart pushes Mungo's suffering so far that you deem this Saint Mungo to be a martyr, and it's all a bit much - granted, I loved A Little Life, but this book is so intentionally over the top that it counts an experiment in extreme pychological wriring and you might even debate whether there's a camp aspect to it, which isn't the case in "Young Mungo".

Young Mungo — Douglas Stuart

Yet despite the multifarious frustrations, and even at its most overexplicit and overwrought, Young Mungo is the work of a true novelist. Bizarre technique cannot crowd out the energy of Stuart’s characters or the organic force of his teeming world. At times he recalls Dostoevsky, in whose work the powerful exists alongside the galumphing. Mungo’s predicament is piercing, and as the story draws to a close, a spectral beauty prevails. Douglas Stuart opens our eyes, minds, and hearts to fear, love, family brokenness, manliness, manhood, masculinity, (gut wrenching examination from every angle) > fragile, rugged, confidence, power, force, muscled, typical traits, ‘Boys Will Be Boys’……a deep look at the traditional and negative effects. Manners jerked on the ground. Mungo looked down at him and for a second, his eyes flashed with an anger so fierce, anyone who saw it would have feared for Manners’ life. In that moment, you could not doubt that Mungo was capable of anything. Both books feature domestic abuse, rape, sexual abuse of minors by those in a position of authority over them - although here (and I think largely reflecting the older age of the point of view character) these are more explicit/graphic.Mungo carefully put down his drink, then gave a conspiratorial wink. ‘I may say, your sister is a perfectly devout young woman. Always on her knees in chapel.’ Not at all. My father has vowed that when he dies, he will free all his slaves. The will is already written. I will have to find some other way of making my fortune.’ Mungo clapped Fairchild on the shoulder. ‘So you see, I will never make a penny out of that institution you revile so much. Whereas you’ – he grinned – ‘will depend entirely on the slave trade to make your living.’ Not at all,’ said Mungo. ‘I wagered ten guineas that I could get at least a hundred votes against the motion. Nobody else thought I would get more than fifty. And though the glory of victory is very fine, I would rather have the extra gold in my purse.’ Some of the alcoholics were eager for the meeting to be over, others were worried about what would happen when it was”. I have to say I was especially impressed by this as I wasn't a huge fan of Stuart's first novel, the Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain. In many ways this feels very similar to SB, however where that one felt like an exercise in writing, something that had been worked on for so long it lost a bit of its life, this felt ripe with experience. Mungo is one of the most endearing, sympathetic and vivid characters I've read about in a long time. That makes the events of this novel all the more powerful. You are rooting for him so badly, that every misstep or hiccup in his life deeply affect the reader.

Mungo Books

The prose is vivid and clear and superb. The dialogue zings with authenticity. The psychologies are startingly sound and the sociology unabashedly hyper-realistic. The connection to emotions is genuine and painful and the breath is shallow and hurried. When I read Shuggie Bain I at least thought that there was an attempt at something in the storytelling... In a second timeline, his mother sends him off with two of her “friends” from Alcoholics Anonymous. Suffice it to say, they are not on the wagon and their intentions are not pure. I couldn’t begin to understand the mother’s reasoning.

Make a list of bad things that could happen in a literary fiction. You will find every item on that list in this novel. It felt like misery porn. Not one good thing happens to anyone! Sensitive readers, stay away from the book. I won’t give a list of trigger warnings so just trust me on this: every single triggering issue is in this storyline. Some of these scenes were way too graphic. It’s a deeply felt - heartbreaking-powerful & beautiful complicated story of a young gay man dealing with traditionalism, tolerance, open-mindedness, responsiveness, observance, freethinking, noncompliance, and ‘young love’….. I'm also happy to say that despite the bleakness that permeates the novel, it's not without hope! I really loved the ending, and the moments that Mungo shares with his downstairs neighbor, a closeted gay man who is ridiculed by the community but whom Mungo comes to understand more deeply as the novel goes on.