One of the more surprising moments in the socially distanced Booker Prize ceremony of 2020 came when that year’s winner, Douglas Stuart (who was taking the award for Shuggie Bain on a video call from his sofa in New York), spoke of the influence of the only other Scot to win the prize, James Kelman. While both novelists portray Glasgow, their birthplace, Kelman is a Beckettian writer of interiority and consciousness; Stuart’s page-turning melodrama owes more to the Victorian tragedies of Thomas Hardy, whose protagonists are likewise splayed on the rack of social prejudice. Much of the tension and pathos of Shuggie Bain and Stuart’s second novel, Young Mungo, lies in the omertà around growing up gay amid the homophobia of late-industrial 20th-century Glasgow, as Stuart, who was born in 1976, did.
His new novel, John of John, takes place in the early years of New Labour, among a shut-in community of crofters and weavers in the Outer Hebrides. The 22-year-old John-Calum Macleod, or Cal, is a textiles graduate struggling to find work in Edinburgh when his father, John, a surly Presbyterian church elder, summons him home with news that his grandmother is unwell, the first of the novel’s countless acts of deceit. Cal, with little to lose, having run up more debt that he can pay scrubbing pub toilets, pops his last ecstasy pill and sets sail.
The novel’s question initially seems to be how Cal will cope with concealing his sexuality after a measure of sexual freedom on the mainland. Back home, affection of virtually any kind is a no-go. “I could do without becoming known as the man who has a hugger for a son,” John warns Cal after he embraces a friend. A neighbour is known as Flash – for Flashdance – because he was once caught jigging to Boney M on the radio. But it isn’t only Cal who stands to suffer: an early chapter narrated from his father’s perspective shows us that John, too, is gay, torn between the possibility of a fresh start with a fellow crofter or merely sticking to his own self-denying lie about why Cal’s mother left for another man.
Dramatic irony is the narrative engine: the novel’s criss-cross of secrecy depends on its characters always being entirely legible to the reader, so as to ensure we can see how much they hide from one another. The first paragraph shows Cal in a phone box (the pre-mobile setting turns out to be important), half-listening to his father as rugby players warm up in a park. “Their white shorts clung to their haunches, and in the soft smirr the cloth became sheer and he could see the elasticated lines of their briefs.” The characterisation, three lines in, is so briskly efficient as to risk being simplistic: of course a gay textiles graduate is thinking about fabric and fucking. Just as blunt is a scene introducing us, through the eyes of Cal’s father, to the neighbour who will prove pivotal to the plot: “Innes wore a brand-new Shetland jumper knitted in the bluish-greyish hue of dried thyme. The colour suited him well.” Stuart’s portentous cadences let us know exactly what’s on the cards.
The emotional impact of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo lies in the choices their protagonists make to survive. Shuggie nurses his mother through alcoholism before finally letting her choke on her own vomit; Mungo allows his drug-dealing brother to take the rap for the killing Mungo has to carry out after he’s discovered with another boy. “I write about tender souls in very hard places,” Stuart once said. But John of John is morally knottier still. One of its boldest scenes shows Cal preparing to masturbate while trying to blot out the thrilling thought of a former friend two years his junior, Doll, who was one of only two other boys in the one-room school they attended. Cal groomed Doll when he was 14; the memory rises (“as his spit pooled in his mouth”) of the boy’s “puppy fat marked by the train tracks of his boxer shorts, his skin pink with excitement, his body tense with fear”.
Cal’s homecoming means that he sees what Doll has since become: a prospectless drunk whose public incontinence leaves him ostracised from a hypocritically Christian community bent on purging shame. The story is only a subplot and the rocky road to liberty for Stuart’s central characters has always entailed collateral sacrifice. Yet John of John dares us to recognise the harshness of that vision.
John of John
Douglas Stuart
Picador, 416pp, £20
[Further reading: Money, a motorhome and the fall of Peter Murrell]
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This article appears in the 27 May 2026 issue of the New Statesman, What Britain won't face