A Son of the Rock

Picador, 2022, 397 p.

This, Stuart’s second novel, is running over much of the same ground as his first, Shuggie Bain. Again we have a mother who is neglectful due to being an alcoholic, and her three children, of whom, here, like Shuggie, Mungo is the youngest. As Shuggie did Mungo has an older brother and sister, in Mungo’s case Hamish (Ha-Ha) and Jodie respectively. Unlike in that first novel the narrative of Young Mungo does not focus on the mother, here Maureen Hamilton, who, because she wants to feel she is still young herself, that she still has a chance in life, insists on being called Mo-Maw rather than Maw, but is mostly seen from Mungo’s viewpoint. The only exceptions to this are passages relating to Jodie’s brief hours of escape from feeling responsible for Mungo – with a married man, one of her teachers no less, not much of an escape – and a brief relation of a telephone call by one of Mungo’s tormentors to his own estranged family.

Mungo is devoted to his mother a fact which Jodie in particular finds irritating. He is also unsure of how to be a man. Perhaps as an indicator of Mungo’s uncertainty Stuart has given him a nervous itch on his face, an itch he keeps scratching.

The novel as a whole is composed of two intermittently interweaved strands which recount events in “The May After” and “The December Before.” The setting is Glasgow sometime in the mid-1980s – Jodie mentions the AIDS epidemic.

In “The May After” Mungo has gone on a fishing trip up north with two men known as Gallowgate and St John. Mo-Maw consented to this as an attempt to toughen Mungo up, to make a man of him. The fact that she knew little of these two, having only met them at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, does not bother her until too late. They take the bus north, soon coming upon “the green hills of Dumbarton.” Well, yes. Compared to Glasgow Dumbarton is green – or the green around it is more easily perceived.

“The December Before” is more the core of the book, describing Mungo’s daily life, tholing Mo-Maw’s prolonged absences from their house, making do as best he can with the help of Jodie’s administrations, his meeting with James Jamieson, who has a doocot on a scrap of waste ground backing onto a motorway, the constant chiding by Hamish (who is the local young hardman) to be more like him. Ironically it is the trip north which does that.

The inhabitants of the close where the Hamiltons live, put-upon Mrs Campbell in the flat below and Poor-Wee-Chickie on the ground floor, the latter the subject of suspicion as being thought to be gay and likely a child molester but who doesn’t care about that, are both kind souls, looking out for Mungo and Jodie. It was in December that Mungo met James and the pair began their friendship which soon grows into something deeper and to which Hamish takes great exception. For two reasons, James is Catholic and Hamish hates them (though he can’t articulate why, only that meting out violence in their direction is fun) but more importantly any hint of Mungo liking boys will reflect badly on Hamish’s standing.

A sentence describes those from more fortunate areas of Glasgow, “Middle-class Glaswegians had no loyalty, when it suited them they draped the city about themselves like a trendy jacket but they knew none of its chill, none of its need. These Glaswegians were acceptably foreign and endlessly entertaining to the English.”

Stuart writes well, his prose is well above serviceable, but I was less enamoured with the violence portrayed. Moreover, the similarities between Young Mungo and Shuggie Bain tend to detract from the impact of either book. In his next book Stuart really needs to break free from the template he has used in his first two.

The cover actually does this book a disservice. The two youngsters kissing have too much facial hair to match the description of Mungo in the novel and the kiss is more passionate, much more uninhibited, than anything that occurs between Mungo and James in the text.

Sensitivity note. Refers to “the Paki shop,” but people did in the 1980s.

Pedant’s corner:- “inside of” (just inside, no ‘of’,) skillful (USian, the British spelling is skilful,) ball-peen hammer (more often spelled ball-pein.) “Other’s didn’t like the way” (Others didn’t like..,) snuck (sneaked,) “by her stocking feet” (stockinged feet,) fit (fitted,) “as his eyes slid towards to the soundless television” (either ‘towards’ or ‘to’; not ‘towards to’,) sprung (sprang,) “Stanley knifes” (Stanley knives,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “had to tilt his head backwards to breath” (to breathe,) “trying to make a man of out you” (a man out of you.)