Episode 102 - TALKING BOOKS: DOUGLAS STUART SPEAKS ABOUT YOUNG MUNGO

 

The 2020 Booker Prize winner, Douglas Stuart, spoke to me about
his sensational second novel, Young Mungo. Stuart became an
international writing sensation after his debut novel, Shuggie
Bain, won the Booker, and gained him countless readers and fans
in the literary world. In this episode, we explored the story of
Mungo in great detail.

As I summated in a review recently (
https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times-daily/opinion-and-analysis/2022-05-19-book-review-the-quiet-violence-of-young-mungo/
), "Young Mungo is set in Glasgow and tells the story of Mungo
and his family. They are a working-class Protestant family, with
plenty of trials and tribulations. His mom, Maureen, is an
alcoholic. His brother, Hamish, several years older, is addicted
to violence, and his sister Jodie, desperate to escape the horror
of their circumstances, is forced to play mother to her younger
brother Mungo because Maureen is never around."

Stuart started off reading from a scene in which a neighbour, Mrs
Campbell, appears to defend her husband who had beaten her up,
resisting the moral criticism of him from young Jodie. We
discussed, in some detail, the complexities of this scene, and
the issues they surface, including the brutalising effect that
working on the ships and in the mines had on many men in
working-class communities. Without excusing domestic violence,
Young Mungo examines the class fissures in 1980s and 1990s
Glasgow and Britain that led to some of the social ills that are
illuminated throughout the novel including alcholism, religious
bigotry, domestic violence, etcetera. 

The whole episode is riveting. Have a listen!