Douglas Stuart’s island of lost souls

Only the surliest of curmudgeons would hint at a downside to winning the Booker prize with one’s first novel. However, since both the writer in question and I are Scottish, and since a glass-half-empty outlook is part of our national caricature, I will indulge myself: surely the weight of anticipation that early Booker-sized success places on future books would be simply too heavy to bear.

Thankfully, Douglas Stuart – who won the Booker in 2020 with Shuggie Bain – has shown that this is not inevitable. His second book, Young Mungo, might not have bagged the prizes that his first did, but it was a highly accomplished work. If anything, it raised our expectations further still. These two novels, though, are very much of a type. Would a third in the same mould suggest an author settling into his comfort zone rather than driving his talent to new frontiers?

All of this is my way of saying that I was a bit apprehensive when I picked up John of John. At first glance, it seems to tread a similar path to the books that came before. Repressed sexuality, loneliness, strained son/parent relationships, the soul-crushing impact of poverty – these are all central themes.

First glances, though, can be deceiving. John of John takes us, literally and metaphorically, to very different places. In fact, in my estimation, it leaves Shuggie Bain in its shadow – a feat many would have thought impossible. This is a richer and more multifaceted novel than the previous two. It is a feature of its complexity and nuance that it manages to be both a darker, more disconcerting read in parts and also one that strikes a more powerfully optimistic note. 

Whereas we meet Shuggie and Mungo as children, the protagonist here – John-Calum, known as Cal – is a young adult. In Cal, there is an echo of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Chris Guthrie – the girl at the heart of his classic 1932 novel Sunset Song. Cal yearns for an education, to see the world and, above all, to escape the suffocation of the deeply religious Western Isles community he grew up in – an environment in which he feels unable to come out as the gay man he is. The fellow students he meets at college on the mainland “should have appalled him – they occasionally terrified him – but in the end he felt the most like himself when he was amongst them”.

And yet, the land he grew up on, and the traditions he is steeped in, exercise a magnetic pull on his loyalties. As he sits on a ferry to the fictional Falabay on the very real isle of Harris, fearing as a result of his father’s deception that his grandmother is ill, a woman asks him: “And what do you have to be grinning about?” 

“Nothing. I’m just happy to be heading home,” is his answer. 

In Stuart’s previous novels, it is the mother/son relationship that dominates. In John of John, Cal’s mother features but she is distant, separated from his father and living elsewhere on the islands with her ex’s brother, Cal’s uncle, and the children they came to have. Instead, it is Cal’s relationship with his presbyterian, overbearing, occasionally violent father that takes centre stage. It is only at the very end of the book that Cal discovers what the reader knows from the first few pages: John, Cal’s father, is also a closeted gay man, a fact he cannot reconcile with his god-fearing view of the world. John’s struggles with his sexuality are movingly revealed in a visit he makes to Innes, his neighbour, and, as we discover, longtime lover: “He took Innes’s hand in his and he stroked the back of it with the side of his thumb.” 

This revelation immediately transforms the reader’s impressions not just of Cal’s father, but also his mother. The presumption that she had abandoned Cal simply for the sake of a relationship with his uncle is challenged. We suspect now that she may have allowed Cal to believe this in order to protect his father’s secret. Readers are left to make up their own minds about the morality of that choice.

The same is true of the book’s other core relationship: the bond between Cal and his childhood friend, Doll Macdonald. Over the course of the novel, Doll, a fisherman, descends deeper into alcoholism and mental illness. That the two boys often had sex together when they were younger is not in doubt. What is much more ambiguous is the extent to which this was consensual on Doll’s part. The spectre of coercion and abuse hangs over their friendship. It makes for uncomfortable reading at times and it certainly complicated my views of Cal, but the account of this relationship, and the space Stuart gives us to draw our own conclusions about it, is one of the novel’s great strengths. Literature, after all, is a place to explore rather than shy away from the dark undersides of human nature. 

For me, however, what sets this novel apart more than anything is its sense of place. Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo are set in Glasgow. In both, the city and its environs give important context to the lives of the characters. In John of John, Harris is a character in its own right. Stuart is masterful in evoking the landscape, culture and traditions of the place: the often stultifying influence of the church; the way neighbours know everything about each other on the surface but hide their deepest secrets for fear of being judged and ostracised; the hand-to-mouth existence of rural life; and the intricacies of crofting and tweed weaving. 

The title itself comes from an island tradition. Cal is asked by the woman at the ferry: “And who do you belong to?” We’re told: “It was a question that islanders always asked. With families struggling on for centuries wherever they had a spit of intractable land, the same names echoed on and on and so they needed to know his sloinntireachd, his lineage.” Cal replies: “I am John of John of Iain of Iain the Breabadair.”

I may have been nervous when I started reading this novel, but by the time I turned its last page I was captivated. John of John is Douglas Stuart’s most consummate work of literature to date. 

John of John by Douglas Stuart is published by Picador (£20). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £17 (15% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

Douglas Stuart will be in conversation with The Observer’s literary editor Tom Gatti at a lunchtime edition of The Observer Book Club at 12:30pm on Thursday 21 May. Tickets available here

Photograph of Luskentyre beach on the isle of Harris by Craig Brown Stock/Alamy