Young Mungo

Mungo is both a product of and a subversion of his environment. Being a loving and forgiving pacifist is celebrated in some contexts, but within the social order and street hierarchy of his community, these qualities put Mungo in danger.

Mungo’s life is characterized by inner and outer pain. Outwardly, his facial tic, in which his muscles twitch uncontrollably and he picks at the skin on his face, is a manifestation of his anxiety. The tic highlights the fact that Mungo often represses his need for love to survive; the tic’s chronic nature gestures at the seeming inescapability of his life. The tic also connects Mungo to the one person with whom he has a reasonably positive relationship: Jodie also has a tic, a nervous laugh that reveals the subconscious stresses that Jodie endures. Hamish’s proclivity to violence is functionally just as habitual and uncontrollable as his siblings’ tics. All three children struggle with the abusive nature of their upbringing. They rely on a woman whose alcoholism controls her life, and whose resentment about her lost youth motivates her to leave her children impulsively to pursue momentary happiness.

Jodie is a source of affection for Mungo, but even that relationship is tinged with conflict. Jodie wants Mungo to be harder on Mo-Maw because Jodie worries that Mungo lets Mo-Maw take advantage of his kindness. The siblings’ dynamic is deeply dysfunctional despite its clear warmth. At the abject failure of Mo-Maw to be maternal, Jodie has taken on the role of mother to Mungo: She helps him with homework, listens to his problems and joys, makes sure he is fed, and supports him with affection and friendship. But this role is an overwhelming responsibility for the teenage Jodie. Though everyone in her community notes that Jodie’s intelligence, kindness, and work ethic make her different and capable, her dream of leaving for university seems insurmountable.

The characters in this novel find themselves obligated to enact stereotypical femininity and masculinity. Jodie’s role as mother and nurturer, and her highly inappropriate sexual relationship with a teacher who believes in her intellectual ability but uses her for her body, emphasize the narrow confines for women in Mungo’s community. Hamish has similarly been boxed into embodying the stereotypical heteronormative male, with a tough exterior and a hardened interior. Hamish had dreams that extended beyond street life, but he was discouraged in school from pursuing them, emphasizing his community’s internalized prejudice against the poor and working-class and the inaccessibility of pathways to education or employment.

Hamish’s failed future and Jodie’s threatened future demonstrate the cyclical nature of poverty in their world. Hamish abandoned his hopes and now replicates cycles of street violence, teaching other boys how to become criminals. Similarly, Jodie is in danger of ending up like her mother—seeking temporary escape through a degrading sexual relationship that threatens to derail her dreams of higher education. Jodie’s relationship with an older, married teacher highlights the over-sexualization of young girls in poverty. Mungo’s outlier personality is the family’s key hope for breaking these cycles: He is inherently calm and loving, putting him at natural odds with his society’s relentless recapitulation of destructive patterns.

In these chapters, Mungo’s coming-of-age story includes the genre-specific trope of the rite of passage. In many traditional cultures, boys undergo trials to prove their masculine bravado, capability, and potential, thereby demonstrating their developing manhood. Here, when Hamish leads his gang through the yard to steal and mess around, what he’s really doing is giving them a test to practice and prove their strength, toughness, and meanness. Running with Hamish’s crew, stealing, fighting, and running from the police, proves that a boy in this community is taking on the role of a man, as the ideal of masculinity in this community are a propensity violence and mischief, not letting your guard down, and defending your dignity because reputation is all you truly have. Mungo’s foray into the wilderness with two older men who have been through arduous rites of their own is a more direct reference to traditional rites of passage—a darkly inverted analog of a scouting camping trip.

In this novel, performing masculinity is important to the development of masculinity. For example, the derogatory term “poofter”—a homophobic slur—is used to denigrate boys and men who don’t act tough. In this community, femininity and homosexuality are qualities to be ashamed of and derided as weak. It is clear that Mungo will never perform the kind of masculinity his community demands. His beautiful face, his gentle demeanor, and his small physique mark him as different. Moreover, Mungo doesn’t sexualize girls, doesn’t pretend to keep up with the other fighting boys, and refuses weapons and gangs—all of which reveals Mungo as an outsider, and a target to bullying. Mungo’s differences expose the falseness of the façade of boys like Hamish, who have created an identity out of performative masculinity.

The need to present a false front, and his inability to do so, has robbed Mungo of self-assuredness and the ability to trust his gut. This is most evident in Mungo’s understanding of Gallowgate. Mungo is scared of Gallowgate, but internalizes his fear as evidence that he doesn’t understand Gallowgate and isn’t giving him a chance. Here, Stuart emphasizes the effect constant derision has had on Mungo—while Mungo’s family is concerned that his naivete will hurt him, it is actually his unacceptable way of being a boy that has disabled his ability to read people. Mungo shouldn’t trust Gallowgate, who forces Mungo to sleep in the same tent to sexually assault Mungo. Mungo worries about the possibility of assault, but when Gallowgate falls asleep, Mungo wonders if he was only imagining the danger.

The novel portrays sex in working-class Glasgow as primarily a way to subjugate or use others. Jodie’s teacher thinks nothing of taking advantage of her poverty to sleep with her in exchange for food; Jocky stays with Mungo’s mother as long as she services his needs and has none of her own. Gallowgate’s story about having sex with both a mother and her teenage daughter, and the tone he uses to brag about this, shows that Gallowgate has fully embraced his self-image as a powerful, sexualized, sexualizing man. This environment forecasts the sexual assaults that Mungo will fall victim to—seen as a feminine man because of his smallness, youth, and beauty, he is a target for the stronger, vicious Gallowgate. Mungo, alone with Gallowgate and St. Christopher, unprotected by parental or authority figures, can do little to defend himself against Gallowgate’s aggression.

The economic realities of Glasgow in the 1980s (the historical setting of this novel) manifest in this section. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, known as “The Iron Lady,” effectively shut down mines and industries in Scotland, which put entire communities out of work. The idea was to import the products being produced by mines and yards instead, so that less tax money would have to go to maintaining physically dangerous jobs that were going out of style as new materials, progressive ways of finding those materials, and machines replaced laborers. This policy devastated industrial communities that had been built with the jobs in mines and shipyards as the end goal, with little emphasis on formal education. These communities saw industrial jobs not just as employment, but as an identity. Shutting down these industries bred much resentment in Glaswegians who found themselves without jobs and without a sense of being. Men, such as Mungo’s neighbor, became depressed when they could no longer provide for their families. With no one investing in the education of younger generations in these communities, boys like Hamish could only see a future in criminality. The men in this novel feel shame over being “on the dole” (on welfare money), and they also have few skills to get jobs in other fields.

Stuart also alludes to the cultural rift between Irish and Scottish people in Glasgow in the 1980s. The Scottish boys refer to the Catholic boys as “Fenians,” a term that comes from the Fianna Erieann, a legendary band of warriors from old Irish literature—here, the Scottish use the term as derogatory mockery. Scotland and Ireland were both colonies of England; for generations, England put Irish and Scottish people in competition for resources and independence. The Catholics of Glasgow, who are presumed to be Irish “Fenians,” are regarded with resentment by Scottish Glaswegians, who have seen non-union Irish immigrants take their old jobs. This historical drama is replayed in the streets of Glasgow, in which Catholicism is associated with Ireland and Protestantism (the slang term “Proddy” is used in this novel) is associated with Scotland. It is an accepted truth that Irish and Scottish young men will fight one another in the streets, and even the fearless Hamish avoids spending unnecessary time in Catholic neighborhoods. Thus, the city is segregated by nationality and religion—divisions that replicate imperialist policies—providing a blueprint for gang warfare. These divisions replicate imperial policies, now so internalized by post-colonized citizens that their internal warfare becomes evidence that they are inherently wild and in need of colonial structure and civilization. Therefore, in cultural dynamics as well as in finance and employment, the actions and ideas of the ruling English continue trickling down and sweeping away Scottish culture and belonging.

Unlike the novel’s nicknamed characters, Mungo identifies by his actual given name—an indication that he retains his sense of integrity, remaining steadfastly peaceful, kind, hopeful, and loving. He is named after Saint Mungo, a Scottish saint best known as the founder of Glasgow. Naming his protagonist after Glasgow’s founder allows Stuart to make Mungo a symbolic representative of Glasgow, no matter how out of place he is in the cultural norms and expectations of his neighborhood—Mungo embodies what Glasgow could or should be. For Mungo, however, his saintly namesake matters less as city founder and more as a healer—Mungo loves the story of Saint Mungo bringing back to life a dead bird that had been killed by a bunch of kids. Stuart makes a direct allusion to this story when Mungo meets James Jamieson—another character whose forthright name and last name declare him to be genuine (if another product of Glaswegian working-class cyclicality, as his last name declares him to be “James, son of James”). Mungo’s revived bird and James’s pigeons symbolize flight, freedom, and escape, which James and Mungo crave—another irony, that the boy named after the patron saint of Glasgow wants nothing more than to leave.