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!