Booker Winner Douglas Stuart Reveals Flashes Of Tenderness In His Violent Working-Class Men

(MENAFN- The Conversation) Douglas Stuart's third novel, John of John, returns to the territory that made his Booker prize-winning Shuggie Bain, and Young Mungo, so unforgettable: the intimate violence of masculinity, and the ways love persists inside families whose members cannot speak or emote plainly to one another.

In Stuart's Falabay, an imagined town on the Isle of Harris in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, the wind batters – and people have learned to endure by saying less than they mean.

Review: John of John by Douglas Stuart (Picador)

John Calum (Cal) Macleod returns home from art school in Edinburgh after his father, John, hints at his grandmother's escalating ailments. For Cal, coming home means regression and constraint. He is indebted, back under the roof of a father who insists, often with overbearing zeal, on obedience and conformity.

In Edinburgh, with dyed hair, new clothes and the agency to publicly express his homosexuality, Cal had begun to assemble a new self. Back in Falabay, Cal is under the roof of his father, a man of unrelenting principle. Control is John's dialect of love. Proximity must be earned through deference. John forces Cal to listen to bible readings:

Intimacy and violence

The Macleods are a weaving family. Stuart, a trained fashion designer, attends to the material textures of that work in imagery of the lanolin that softens and splits skin and fibres that embed themselves in the knuckles of the men.

In two scenes in particular, Stuart demonstrates his skill at writing the tactile and physical. He illustrates John's attentive care for his son, as well as his violent impulses. After Cal's hands have been cracked and inflamed by overexposure to artificial heat in the weave shed, John makes him sit, and cares for him“as he might care for any useful tool”.

Later, Cal insists on returning the care and tends to his father's own damaged hands, tweezing wool from John's inflamed skin and cleaning the wounds.“Look at you two playing nail salons,” Cal's grandmother, Ella, jokes – yet the intimacy here is unmistakable.

Stuart writes men who are simultaneously opaque to themselves, and overexposed to the community's judgement.

John polices Cal's appearance, forbidding him from attending church with neon orange hair, as though colour itself were a provocation. When Cal insists on attending anyway, John beats him in the car.

“He braced his left hand on Cal's lapel and with his right he punched his son three more times, each blow stronger in its fury and determination.” The beating over, he glimpses his reflection.“Now that the anger had gone, he didn't know what had possessed him. When he looked in the mirror he saw a devil, and the devil wore his face.”

The scene captures how visibility becomes a moral test in communities trained to prize conformity.

Stuart refuses to excuse John, allowing him full moral agency. Something (the devil) has influenced his behaviour, but John is still the perpetrator. Despite moments of tenderness towards his son, he remains a man who harms people he loves – and crucially, who cannot and will not apologise.

The novel's most complex reality lies in a truth disclosed early, then handled with delicate restraint: John is in love with his neighbour and childhood friend, Innes. Their relationship is a long, quiet arrangement of glances and hedged intimacies, often reset by John's fear and Innes' patience.

Stuart gives Innes an eloquent verdict:“It went like this, loving John Macleod. You did it against all reason, against all your better judgement, and in that exact moment he starved the embers into submission, he had the skill to blow on them gentle and ignite them again.” Loving John is an exercise of endurance.

Desire and rejection

For Cal, desire is improvised and punctured by rejection. He answers a lonely-hearts ad and is rebuffed. He fixates on and tries to seduce Innes, an act of longing and misrecognition – a young man reaching for the closest possibility of being known and understood.

If John's love is performed through maintenance and denial, Cal's is performed through desperate pursuit. He wants to be seen and held, tenderly.

Stuart has a gift for the social contours of villages. In the grudges that accrue and create impenetrable fortresses, Stuart illustrates how family fractures become public currency and harden into comic custom. In Falabay, the MacInnes brothers, Innes and Sorley, share a house without having spoken to each other for 16 years.

Every conversation is duplicated, an arrangement of avoidance, because acknowledgement would concede too much. Cal's childhood friend, Doll Macdonald, nursing old hurt about Cal“leaving him behind” drinks his life into collapse. Stubbornness provides a kind of safety from ruin. No single slight causes these outcomes, nor could an apology prevent them.

Stuart is attentive to the drawn-out violence of pride and how it makes these men choose solitude over repair, principle over mercy.

Falabay is not glamorised: poverty and precarity pervade the novel, though less centrally than in Shuggie Bain or Young Mungo. Employment is seasonal and signing on (claiming unemployment) becomes an ethical debate whispered over the kitchen table, while the weather decides if your family will eat that night.

Cal's university debts from Edinburgh haunt the family. In one sharp exchange, John and Cal argue in Gaelic about the dole – is it“dishonest,” or simply necessary?

Controversial on Christianity

Stuart's handling of religion will be the most controversial element for some readers. It would be wrong to say the novel mocks faith, but it does associate the practise of Christianity with control.

The local minister presides rather than pastors, the congregation is fixated on keeping up social appearances rather than neighbourly care and John is a man who turns Scripture into a blunt instrument of discipline. There's a matching economy here with the island's other social systems: faith is kept in working order by policing the boundaries of who belongs.

As a Christian reader, I recognise the ache of filial misunderstanding here, but grace is noticeably absent from the novel. Stuart's fictional church in Falabay is rendered with nuance, but the faith enacted is mostly a language of pressure: public morality without consolation and doctrine without hospitality.

I longed for a glimpse of forgiveness and repair, especially given the novel's acute awareness of the ways in which shame distorts the expression of love.

Stuart writes the church in the Scottish Isles as these characters experience it, and he refuses the consolation of counterexample. His refusal is an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one. The novel's tone remains austere; every consolation is so hard won.

What the novel intricately captures, with unsparing clarity, is how religious performance can lend cover to pride, and how the need to appear righteous can crowd out gentleness and grace.

John of John is a bleak novel, but not entirely hopeless. Tenderness is an event – fleeting, fragile – all the more arresting because of its scarcity. Stuart slows his sentences around these moments: the shoulder‐to‐shoulder quiet after an argument, his grandmother's silent interventions, the small, comic abrasions of family life.

Readers of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo will recognise Stuart's signature: lyrical attention to harm, fierce compassion for children negotiating adult failures, men whose desires costs them dearly, households where harm and love continually conflict.

Falabay may be fictional, but its social world feels unbearably accurate. Stuart has returned to his territory and deepened it.

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