Douglas Stuart: Young Mungo

Young Mungo is the follow up to Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize winning debut novel.

Like its predecessor, Young Mungo is set in working class, post- industrial Glasgow.

It centres on a romance between two teenage boys, Mungo is Protestant, James is Catholic, growing up in an environment characterised by sectarian violence and poverty.

Stuart himself is Glasgow born and bred and turned to writing after a successful career in fashion.

Mungo is a sensitive soul finding his way in a tough, violent world Stuart tells Kathryn Ryan.

“He's a little bit of my love song to very sensitive, kind, gentle men and he doesn't want to be the type of man that either his sister or his brother expect of him. And instead, he meets another young man called James and the develop first of friendship, and then it becomes something more.”

Mungo’s journey towards masculinity echoes Stuart’s, he says.

“I was thinking about my own relationship with masculinity and how I often had to perform my own masculinity as a young man to fit in with the tribe, to be as macho as the other men around me whether … fighting or chasing girls or playing football.

“And I actually had no interest in any of those things. But I still got caught up in a construct and a group that needed me to be part of that. He's a very sensitive, introspective, young man and yet he finds himself having to do these things against his will.”

The tribalism in east Glasgow was a way for young men to forge some kind of identity, he says.

“If you were to cut these men through the centre there, there really is no difference socio economically, or certainly how religiously observant they are, because it was actually becoming a very secular city by that point.

“But sometimes when you divide people at a schooling age, when you then support or legitimise it by soccer or football and say one team is for Protestants and one team is for Catholics, then the young men can feel very divided. And they can feel very tribal in that way. And that's what Mungo really experiences.”

The character of James is a form of wish fulfilment, he says.

“I grew up in the east end of Glasgow, and I felt very much that I was the only queer or gay person there. And of course, you're not, it's just there was very limited visibility at that time. “

It was also a city of extremes in the 1990s, he says.

“Glasgow was a city of almost 1.2 million people. It's an incredibly diverse city. It has some pockets of extreme wealth, a growing middle class, some of the oldest culture in the country, it was, it really is a very diverse city.

“And yet, because I grew up in poverty, I didn't get to see any of it until I was about 18. And some of the loveliest parts of the city were only a mile and a half, three miles away from where I grew up. And I still never got to see it. It was a question about socio economic mobility.

“But there was also a psychological barrier, why would it be a boy like me get to go to this part of the city, who's inviting me to these nice neighbourhoods?”

Growing up as a young, gay, working class man in Glasgow in the late ‘80s early ‘90s was doubly traumatic, he says.

“It was a pretty limiting time to be a young working class or a poor, gay person in the UK at that time. Not only were you dealing probably if you came from an industrial community with mass unemployment, but it was also under the fear of AIDS.

“It was a time when the age of consent was 21, for gay people had just been legalised a couple of decades before, but most oppressively was Section 28, which was the Thatcher government's policy to deny any young queer people support from teachers or university lecturers or counsellors.

“It really said that nobody in a position of power was allowed to talk about any alternative sexuality. And so that really oppresses boys like them [Mungo and James] from the top down, it tells society that it's okay not to think that these young men are fine as they are.”

And economically areas like east Glasgow were left to rot by the Conservative government of the time, Stuart says.

“In industrial Glasgow unemployment went to 20 percent. And it stayed there for most of my youth.

“And there was a feeling that men who had really built Britain, who had done hard, dangerous jobs that were often underpaid, whether it was coal mining, or steel manufacturing or shipbuilding, were suddenly tossed to the side, we were told that they were in the way of progress.

“And that not only destroyed those men, but it destroyed their sons and the people who would come after them. Because we were seen as standing in the way of a nation that wanted to de-industrialise very quickly.”

The Conservative government knew what de-industrialisation would do to cities like Glasgow, and yet let it happen anyway, he says.

“And what it actually did to men in the east end of Glasgow is it took 11 years off their life expectancy, which is an enormous amount in one of the richest countries in the world.”

An education was Stuart’s route out of poverty, he says.

“I was in a strange position because I was so much younger than my brother. And I was born very late into my parents’ marriage. And so, I got to see the Thatcher effects play out at our dinner table.

“That meant by the time I was 16, I was the first person in my family to finish high school, I was certainly the first person to go to college. But I had no other options, I saw my family work very hard, and they were employed, but they were always very underpaid and worried about making it through another week.”

When he was 16 a teacher spotted artistic talent in him and suggested he study textile design.

“That was a very proud Scottish trade, it's a very Scottish thing, we make lots of different types of beautiful cloth. And that was the education that elevated me to the middle class and allowed me to, I guess, build a future for myself. I place a lot of stock in education.

“But I had no other choice, I had to do that. And the problem was my siblings couldn't do that, because they hadn't been given enough time and enough warning or enough chance to pivot.

“And so, in a way, it makes me incredibly sad. But it brought me to New York, I suppose and in New York, I was able to turn around and I was able to look at the situation. And I thought, I have to write about this, I have to write Shuggie Bain.”

He writes in the authentic voice and dialect of the Glaswegian working classes, Stuart says.

“I wanted to write the way that I saw things to be true otherwise, there was no point in me writing it, I almost excluded a reader’s expectation from the process because they were too oppressive in many ways.

“And I think that is a thing that working-class writers and queer writers have to face, that sometimes middle-class writers just don't; we have such a burden of representation and the stories that people want from us versus the stories that we should be telling.”

He is working on his third novel and there are plans to televise Shuggie Bain, he says.

“I'm teaching myself at the moment how to write screenplays, and how to think about things in a dramatic arc.

“And that's been a wonderful new set of skills to learn and to explore.”