A Tortured Love Story

With a keen sense of place as a driving force in human development, Douglas Stuart ferries readers from the gritty Glasgow tenements of his first two novels — the Booker Prize-winning breakout sensation Shuggie Bain and the Carnegie Medal finalist Young Mungo — to the sprawling, sea-battered Isle of Harris in his engrossing new novel, John of John.

Though the new book’s central landscape has shifted from cramped, urban apartments to far-flung Scottish pastures, Stuart’s authorial concerns here are largely unchanged: the brutality of poverty and addiction; the tension between filial duty and freedom; the bruising impact of hard labor on the body and mind; and the secret, searing desires of queer boys and men yearning to claim their full selves in environments inhospitable to their honest identities. In John of John, Stuart is at the height of his formidable storytelling powers.

After four years at art school in Edinburgh, 22-year-old, free-spirited John-Calum, known as Cal, is called home by his brooding, Presbyterian father, John, to care for his maternal grandmother, the banter-loving Glaswegian wit Ella. Whether Ella is actually ailing is unclear to Cal, but he’s out of money and options and suffers a queasy sense of indebtedness to his father and grandmother, both of whom cared for him when his mother walked out.

Stuart infuses Cal’s homeward journey with equal parts internal and external difficulty as the boy takes “a bus to a coach, to a coach, to a hostel, to a coach that boards the Kyle ferry, to another bus, to this island ferry, to the island bus, and then, finally, to the long walk at the end.” Cal spends 20 grueling hours traveling a mere 300 miles, popping an ecci (ecstasy) on the last seafaring leg, less to ease the physical symptoms associated with crossing The Minch — a tumultuous channel linking the Atlantic to the Sea of the Hebrides — and more to numb the anguish of going home, where his queerness will live underground. Making matters more turbulent, Cal has an awkward conversation on the boat with his family’s longtime neighbor, Innes MacInnes, the “only friend his father seemed to have.”

Once on the island, Cal’s trajectory goes from unfortunate to bleak. His father’s unpredictable temper, deranged religiosity, and insistence that Cal work the weaver’s loom, herd sheep, and clean up his effeminate style, bear down so hard on his son that breakage seems inevitable. A squabble during a car ride after Cal had the nerve to, in Big John’s mind, “stroll into church with a woman’s haircut and pop music blaring where only the word of God should be” ends with John suddenly and repeatedly punching his bewildered son in the face.

But if Cal feels increasingly trapped on the island by secrets, rarely met desires, and violence, it is his father’s imprisonment inside his own lie of a life — which is slowly revealed to the reader by way of Stuart’s signature prowess with dramatic irony and character interiority — that becomes something sinister in its claustrophobic totality.

Stubborn, angry, and deeply afraid, this father and son pair are nonetheless linked by a deep love that is as complicated and uneven as the ancestral land to which they are bound. Take, for instance, the tenderness and care Cal applies in moisturizing his father’s blistered hands, scalded raw by the space heater dragged out to an otherwise frigid weaver’s shed: “Cal patted them gently and even though he took great care not to rub the inflamed skin, the towel spotted with blood. He was careful with his father.” And when Cal asks his father if he ever gets lonely working by himself, he expects Big John to deliver “some trite line about the omnipresence of the Lord, but John surprised him when he said, ‘I think about you. And I talk to you. Tell you the little things about my day.’”

Weaponized language and the refusal to speak truthfully, if at all, plague this tiny community. When John and Cal want to exclude Ella from conversations, they speak in Scottish Gaelic, or Gàidhlig, in front of her. Innes lives in a small house with his brother Sorley, yet they have “not spoken a direct word to each other in over sixteen years.” Ella, keeper of her own secrets, speaks most frequently with a sheep, though it is with his grandmother that Cal finds himself able to hold something approaching honest conversations. That said, as the book gathers momentum toward a brilliant conclusion, it is a lie of language that just might allow both father and son to honor their deepest truths.

What Stuart pulls off in the full expression of this very particular and specific father-son love story — leaning into the ugly resentments and nonetheless tender, generous ties of two tortured men — is a heartfelt feat of the highest literary order.