Books I've Read: Young Mungo

I picked this one up at the library because it's by the same author as Booker Prime winner, Shuggie Bain.  And like Shuggie Bain, it's a bleak, realistic, somewhat gruelling look at life as a poor person in Glasgow.

Mungo is the youngest child of a woman who was too young when she started having kids.  His older brother runs a group of young thugs and expects Mungo to be a part of his gang or at the very least, be hard enough not to embarrass him.  His sister adores him and has basically brought him up since their mother is given to drunken rages and disappearing for days on end.

When Mungo meets James, a Catholic who lives in the street behind him, they become friends. Everything Mungo has been searching for in his life becomes reality with James.  Yet because of the sectarian divide in their city,  the pair should be sworn enemies.  Their friendship must be a secret and when they fall in love, even more so.

Mungo has to keep his true self hidden from everyone around him because in the world in which he lives, violence is only ever a second away.  James and Mungo dream of leaving Glasgow, of finding a place where they will be safe and able to love one another without fear.  But is it ever really possible to leave?

The story is told across multiple time periods, partly on a fishing trip to a loch where things become more and more sinister for Mungo and partly in the past as Mungo remembers the events leading up to his being sent on the fateful trip.

This is a grim book, even harrowing in parts.  These are hard lives and people who have done what they had to do to survive them.  But there are moments of light and hope and Mungo's certainty that there is something better for him out there keeps things from becoming unbearable.

I can't say I really enjoyed this book, but I liked it a lot - more than Shuggie Bain actually - and I do recommend it.  It's just a tough read.  But I think it's worth it.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars--Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic--and they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds.

As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. And when several months later Mungo's mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.

Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in the literary world, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.