If he can achieve this, Jodie will be liberated from the self-sacrifice required to care for him and freed to cultivate her own talents. Instead, she wants Mungo to develop a capacity to survive without being mothered, as she has. Jodie cannot wholly fill the void left by their dead father and largely absent and self-absorbed mother. One is his older, intelligent, industrious sister, Jodie, who does the bulk of the parenting in their household. Mungo’s love is only truly reciprocated by two people. While his siblings respond to their childhood deprivations by acquiring a thick skin or embracing a cynical world view, Mungo retains a need to trust and love people who are inclined to exploit his need. Perhaps this is a product of youthfulness: Saint Mungo becomes Young Mungo, who is so vulnerable, neglected, and brutalised that he can only be an exemplar of virtue. Mungo is named after a saint and, like Shuggie before him, is saintly in his predispositions. This deficit leaves him continually susceptible to manipulation and peril. Mungo struggles to read people effectively, to ‘see the difference between what someone said and what they truly meant’. Hamish despises softness because he has been deprived of it, just as he despises the middle-class Glaswegians who ‘draped the city about themselves like a trendy jacket, but they knew none of its chill, none of its need’.
We learn that he was viciously strapped by his mother as punishment for misbehaviour as a child and that he had to repress any desire for nurture and safety. Mungo’s older brother, Hamish, is a brutal and domineering gang leader, much like his dead father. In Shuggie Bain, if a boy is violent or abusive, a violent and abusive father is quickly introduced to explain the boy’s behaviour. These are extreme settings with outsized personalities that are formed (or malformed) by intense experiences. The social worlds and domestic lives represented in Stuart’s novels threaten to produce caricatures instead of rounded figures. It’s showing what you feel on the inside without ye even asking it.’ One character observes of Mungo: ‘It’s like your face has a mind of its own. Other boys conceal their fears and yearnings, but theirs rise to the surface. They both walk with feminine flourishes that can’t be modified. Shuggie dances compulsively Mungo has a facial tic. Shuggie detests the untidiness of other boys and their passion for sport, their assertive physicality, and Mungo exhibits a similar wariness. Their titular protagonists must fit into their environment if they want to survive, but neither possesses that talent. Both novels are populated with alcoholic mothers and violent or absent fathers whose neglected children are forever vulnerable to abuse and hardship. Like the Booker-winning Shuggie Bain (2020), Douglas Stuart’s second novel is set in the post-Thatcher, post-industrial, working-class Glasgow housing schemes dominated by unemployment and dysfunctional families.
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