Young Mungo

Stuart introduces his protagonist as a boy lost on his way through adolescence. Mungo’s small stature, which makes him appear younger than he actually is, is immediately presented as potentially dangerous, introducing physical conflict early in the novel. The smaller Mungo is, the more disadvantaged he is in conflicts with other boys and men, which are always resolved through physical confrontation. The bruising on his ribs and the allusion to a fight he lost implies that Mungo is an easy target for violence. The two men he’s traveling with easily overpower him when they want to see his bruises, emphasizing Mungo’s constant losing battle against the world to protect his body. The idea that these men, strangers to Mungo, are taking him to the countryside to teach him to be a man further confirms the importance of Mungo’s perceived physical weakness. It immediately characterizes Mungo as an outsider in his society, a boy not big or tough enough to fight and therefore emasculated and worthy of derision.

Mungo is also characterized by his naivete. His mother and sister worry that he takes people at their word too often; Mungo hasn’t yet learned that people often mean something other than what they say. In his working-class Glaswegian society, this quality of innocence, like his size, makes him a likely target, childlike and easily overpowered. But the novel implies through this characterization that Mungo is morally good and therefore seeks goodness—he doesn’t assume everyone around him is lying all the time or being misleading because he’s honest. The irony is that while we generally judge integrity as a good quality, in Mungo’s situation, it is dangerous—a reversal that marks Stuart’s value judgment of Mungo’s world.

These characterizations of Mungo as kind, uninterested in fighting, and vulnerable reflect larger issues in his society. Mungo is not the problem; his society of violence and dishonesty is the problem. The fact that Mungo needs to be more on guard, untrusting of the people around him, and able to fight off other boys, implies that Mungo lives in a situation in which people are always abusing him or lying to him. Mungo’s family wants him to adapt to this reality, hoping that helping him to become bigger and more street-smart might save him from future conflict and shame. But violence and dishonesty don’t come naturally to Mungo, which makes Mungo a black sheep in his community—but also a person full of potential if only he could escape to the outside world. If Mungo can’t fit into his Glasgow neighborhood’s culture, then he’ll have to find his own path and identity somewhere else, or else perish under the pressures of his hyper-masculinized society. Stuart suggests that because it demands to change what is natural and good about him, Mungo’s society is irreparably flawed.

This judgment of society implies several things about the two men Mungo is traveling with. Because they are from Mungo’s community, they too face the same pressures to conform to expectations of masculinity. Mungo’s chaperones are characterized through their gruff physicality: They are withered, losing their looks to age and the roughness of poverty. Their behavior—slightly combative, drunk, yet ultimately capable of their own kindnesses—is the product of having grown up active participants in this world of toughness, made even more difficult by their obvious poverty. Gallowgate’s tattoos are another way to perform masculinity—via this symbol visible pain and camaraderie. Though these men are successful enough in their society to be selected to show Mungo how to become a man, they struggle with their own insecurities. St. Christopher’s drinking and AA sponsorship suggests an addiction that brings him shame and vulnerability. Both are unhealthy, irresponsible, and depressed. They too are victims of the society for which they are meant to prepare Mungo.

Stuart emphasizes Mungo’s youth to signal that the novel will be a coming-of-age story. There is much about the world Mungo doesn’t know because of his dearth of experiences. Escaping the cityscape of Glasgow and glimpsing the countryside for the first time fills him with awe. The contrast between the natural beauty and quiet of the landscape and the din and dirt of the industrialized city exposes Mungo to new possibilities. Stuart also contrasts how people behave in the city and the country. Rural people seem richer to Mungo because they have houses, while country folk are suspicious of St. Christopher and Gallowgate’s city-inflected public drinking, smoking, and cursing.

This section also underscores the importance of nicknames in the novel. The two men who bring Mungo into the countryside do not introduce themselves by their given names. Rather, they identify themselves with somewhat mysterious nicknames—ones rife with deep irony. St. Christopher, for example, has been nicknamed after the Christian martyr who is considered the patron saint of travelers and a protector of children—a horrific misnomer, given what the novel’s St. Christopher will do to Mungo. Gallowgate is more straightforwardly foreboding nickname that implies a symbolic line between life and death: A gallows’ gate signals that a prisoner has come to his place of execution. Mungo’s mother’s nickname is based on her alcohol addiction, emphasizing the hold alcohol has over her identity. When she is on a bender, overextending her vulnerability to strangers and blaming her unhappiness on her children, Mungo’s siblings call her “Tattie-bogle,” a Scottish slang term for scarecrow. The nickname is an attempt at harm-reduction: Like a scarecrow, Mungo’s drunken mother is frightening on the outside, but essentially harmless on the inside. At the same time, the nickname implies that her drunken rages reduce her to merely a simulacrum of a person rather than a loving and empathetic human being. Moreover, the comparison to a scarecrow hints at Mo-Maw’s inability to be a real protector for her children—she is a placeholder who can do little to stop the predation her children experience. However, by nicknaming their mother Tattie-bogle, her children exhibit a slight optimism: They compartmentalize their mother’s binges as a separate identity, so they can retain some respect for her.