In 1994, James Kelman won the Booker Prize for his novel How Late It Was, How Late. He was the first Scottish author to win the accolade. The win was controversial; notable columnist and author Simon Jenkins called the book “literary vandalism” and accused it of being written in “Glaswegian Alcoholism.” Kelman fought against these claims in his acceptance speech: “A fine line can exist between elitism and racism…On matters concerning language and culture, the distinction can sometimes cease to exist all together.”
Twenty-six years later, another Scottish author won the Booker Prize: Douglas Stuart for his debut novel Shuggie Bain. In an interview with the Booker Prize, Stuart claimed How Late It Was, How Late, changed his life; “it is also one of the first times I saw my people, my dialect, on the page.”
Stuart’s second novel, Young Mungo, is set a year before How Late It Was, How Late was published, in a Glasgow that isn’t on the brink of a civil war, but in many of its schemes- is already fighting one. The armies? Young boys armed with knives and bricks and Sectarian chants about killing either Catholics or Protestants. This is a Glasgow Stuart is familiar with, having grown up there himself- he tells a beautiful story about the eponymous Mungo coming to terms with the fact he is gay.
The Glasgow of Young Mungo is a city split into halves. The rich and the poor, Protestants and Catholics, violent men and vulnerable women. This Glasgow, where computers are still a rarity and where the girls listen to Take That, is a city set firmly in the past, but to suggest it doesn’t exist is a disservice to the city’s durability- this Glasgow still exists in fragments.
There are still young girls at Hutchesons Grammar School (a private school two train rides away from where I grew up) who are shoo-ins for Edinburgh University. Some Protestants still march in the Orange Walks, red in the face and screaming over the drums about killing Catholics. Some Catholics, though they have never set foot in Ireland, swear it to be their motherland and sing IRA songs as though they understand the Irish conflict. There are still young boys that fight and young girls doomed to grow up too soon.
As with every city, horror can slip through the cracks of Glasgow. You hear the violent words spill out of school boys, threatening each other with acts of which they don’t understand the consequences. You see girls get catcalled and threatened with unspeakable acts of cruelty, and of course, those very girls hit an invisible self-destruct button. However, as well as the cruelty of urban life, there is unspeakable kindness in Glasgow. Stuart recognises this acutely in his interview with the Booker Prize: “The hardest-done-to Glaswegians are the most compassionate and giving people I have ever met.” And this is perhaps what separates Stuart from Kelman.
One of the main critiques of Kelman’s novel How Late It Was, How Late was its supposed overuse of swearing. I deem this a ridiculous assertion; Kelman’s novel is stream-of-consciousness. Nobody uses polite language when thinking to themselves, especially when enduring trauma. Young Mungo has expletives, violence, and a teenage girl having an affair with her Modern Studies teacher, resulting in a backstreet abortion. But that kindness, that softness built in the foundations of Young Mungo (see here Mungo’s second kiss being referred to as being like “buttered toast” and his unfaltering loyalty to his alcoholic mother) is what makes it perhaps more palatable to the reviewers that condemned How Late it Was, How Late. Guardian columnist Leo Robson says that “Bizarre technique cannot crowd out the energy of Stuart’s characters or the organic force of his teeming world. At times he recalls Dostoevsky, in whose work the powerful exists alongside the galumphing.” Dostoyevsky. Stuart gets Dostoyevsky, Kelman gets “Glaswegian Alcoholism” (Jenkins is now a columnist for the Guardian, like Robson.)
So, How Late It Was, How Late and Young Mungo both tell working-class Glaswegian narratives. Both have won Booker Prizes. Both tell the stories of troubled men. How Late It Was, How Late may have been called “literary vandalism” by a few, and Young Mungo may only be seen as palatable because of the age of its protagonist, but those reviewers possibly do not understand that working-class characters are more than cartoonish, crude punchlines. Their settings and homes deserve to be described and seen with as much love and tenderness as Kelman and Stuart give them.
Image “Douglas Stuart (2021)” by librairie mollat is licensed under CC BY 3.0.