“Bad things happen to wee boys in dark forests.” The blatant foreshadowing is one of Stuart’s few authorial missteps. “Dinnae go far, Mungo,” says one of the bad ’uns, who calls himself “Gallowgate”. Mo-Maw’s way of doing this is to send Mungo off on a fishing trip into the wilderness with two obviously dodgy men she barely knows from AA meetings. His mother and sister convince themselves he is a “late bloomer”, a fatherless boy who needs a firm hand from someone who knows how to “make a man out of you”. It is obvious to everyone that Mungo is different. But the solidarity itself is divided along sectarian lines, with everyday life played out against a backdrop of Orange marching bands playing The Sash. But it’s f-n’ good fun.” The community around them is marked, as such communities always are, by a combination of brutality and solidarity. “It’s about honour, mibbe?” Ha-Ha replies. Why must Protestants fight Catholics, young Mungo asks ingenuously. Stuart realises his secondary characters fully: Mungo’s sensible elder sister, Jodie, quietly planning an escape from the East End his bruiser of an elder brother, Hamish, (who goes by “Ha-Ha”) with his “skilled arm for smiting”. Her children cope with her episodes in the only way they know, by distinguishing her alcoholic persona from her sober self with a special name, “Tattie-bogle, like some heartless, shambling scarecrow.” His mother, “Mo-Maw”, is another alcoholic, though lacking some of Agnes’s warmth and charm. Our protagonist, the Mungo of the title, is a delicate Glaswegian boy who knows no world beyond the East End. Young Mungo begins with a setting barely distinguishable from Shuggie’s. No one was altogether to blame, no one altogether exempt from responsibility. What distinguished the book from your average misery memoir was the richness and detail of the picture Stuart painted of working-class Glasgow in the 1980s, a world of pawnshops, AA meetings and giro queues. Stuart’s unvarnished portrait of her gin-soaked neglect was certainly not forgiving. Shuggie Bain could just as well have been named after Shuggie’s impossible, charismatic, alcoholic mother, Agnes. It took its time, didn’t try to explain everything, and trusted its readers with dialogue in dialect and characters who were hard to love.

Douglas Stuart’s Booker-winning debut, Shuggie Bain (2020), didn’t earn its well-deserved popularity with the “common reader” by being undemanding.

Young mungo douglas stuart