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In America, the poor cling to their guns and bibles, as then-Senator Barack Obama controversially observed in 2008. Except, in the fictional town of Falabay off the coast of Scotland, the poor cling to sheep and bibles. And if the island lacks the gun violence of America, Falabay is rife with entrenched zealotry and a community fighting for relevance in the new social order like sick animals backed into a corner.
Situated on the Isle of Harris—a windy outpost to the northwest of the Scottish mainland—Falabay is the setting of Douglas Stuart’s new novel, John of John, his third. It is to the Isle that John-Calum “Cal” Macleod returns: After spending the last five years living on the mainland, he’s come back to the rural “moonscape” that birthed him. Falabay is a hard place, a rocky terrain where Calvinist Presbyterianism still prospers in defiance of mainland modernism. A place with more sheep than men, and more men than women. Away from the working-class Glasgow crumbling under a decade plus of privatization that anchored the author’s first two works, his debut and Booker Prize–winning novel, Shuggie Bain, and his triumphant follow-up, Young Mungo.
Cal is not just returning to a place, but a state of mind he had hoped to never inhabit again. He must repress the urges, desires, and needs beneath the surface of John Macleod’s only son. “It was impossible to look at the unforgiving beauty and not feel the hand of God,” Cal thinks looking out the window of his father’s home, “albeit a God that cared nothing for your comfort, a God who expected you to struggle if you were to endure.”
In each of Stuart’s novels, the protagonists are struggling to endure. Shuggie Bain is struggling to make sense of his place in the unforgiving council estate that surrounds him, his youthful innocence and peculiarity shining against the backdrop of mass unemployment and addiction. Teenaged Mungo Hamilton is struggling to adapt, exploring his sexuality and falling in love despite the creeping rot of neoliberalism that turns Mungo’s own family members against him as industry evaporates and sectarian violence and tribalism flourish in the absence of socioeconomic purpose. And, now, Cal Macleod is struggling to reconcile his queerness with tradition.
Although Cal’s Scotland looks a lot different than Shuggie’s or Mungo’s, his story continues the theme of the first two novels, expanding the hardly fictionalized economic and cultural decimation of Margaret Thatcher’s primacy from the urban to the rural. Taking up the mantle of the class-conscious novelist, Stuart employs surgical prose to weave the traditionalism of the Outer Hebrides into the patchwork of his postindustrial bibliography.
The set up seems trite: small town with big secrets. Conservative father clashes with his bohemian son. The prodigal Cal has lived his sinful ways and now must atone and humble himself as he returns to his hometown. But as with each of Stuart’s novels, there are a million stories told in each line of his reserved prose. Too introspective to be “minimalist,” Stuart’s sentences leave enough space between his characters’ hopes and fears for the reader to fill them in with their own intuitions, an interactive reading experience delivered by letting go of the reader’s hand rather than holding onto it.
For example, Cal’s father, John isn’t a villain. Instead, Stuart builds a character, deeply flawed and hurtful, much the same way he did the maternal antiheroes of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo.
Stuart lost his own mother to alcoholism, potentially mirroring the caricatures of Agnes Bain or Maureen Hamilton. But Stuart approaches addiction with overwhelming empathy for the addict. These characters, more often brutal than kind, are merely flawed beings doing the best that they can to cope with the end of history. Women raised to please men, left husbandless in a world unkind to unwed mothers, who turn to the drink to numb the loneliness. And while tragedy is woven into every line of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, there is a kindness that melts over the page, recognizing the beauty in imperfection and every day individuals.
John Macleod is written in the same vein, choosing both fight and flight. All of his fears and insecurities are funneled toward Cal. He represents everything wrong with the world, while, from that same vantage point, represents the promise that everything will be all right. John is proud that Cal is his son. One of the only things left he has to be proud of.
From a young age, Cal has demonstrated a gift for weaving, a primary source of income for John, Ella, and many on the island, which is known around the world for its Harris Tweed. “The cloth” is the tradition that bridges the generational and identity gap between Cal and John. In his father’s shed, Cal works the loom next to his father and next to Ella, his grandmother, weaving together as the fractured family they are, in awe of the beauty of their creations. This is something Cal can’t help but exclaim as he sets foot in his father’s shed for the first time since returning from the mainland.
The shelves were full of hundreds of yarns, all the romantic colours of Scotland: bracken and grouse, gorse and heather, rain and moss, the chafed red of a drunkard’s face, and pure, bilious whitey. Amongst these were punkish hot pinks and acid yellows, violet tones that made people recoil until they saw the finished cloth and saw how skilfully John could mix sour greens with wheats and nightshades until it was a field of spring bluebells.
Just as the author pushes the geography of his fiction to the Scottish countryside, so does the complex familial relationship that predominates his earlier books shift from the maternal to the paternal in John of John. John Macleod is deeply religious and Protestant above all in his work ethic. “If the quiet starts to bother you, then make yourself busy. I find that helps,” John tells his son in a moment of grief. “His father put all his faith in the Presbyterian penicillin. For whatever ailed you there was only one cure: work and prayer.”
Cal is twenty-three, much older than Shuggie or Mungo. He has graduated college and tasted the freedom provided by the luxury of anonymity in Edinburgh, embracing life as a gay man in the runup to the new millennium: “He had loved how he could go to the newsagent on a Sunday morning, how he could pass a hundred different people and none of them knew his face.”
Edinburgh had been a far cry from the desolate island of Cal’s childhood, where most of the residents are related in some way or another. One can easily picture the rural poverty weighed against the pastoral beauty of the Outer Hebrides. Wet sheepdogs and Chrysler Sunbeams that won’t start. Spare machine parts rusting up against the side of the house while overdraft statements stack high on the kitchen table inside, lost undercoat sheared from the herd on its way to the loom.
John calls Cal back home under the pretenses that his grandmother, Ella, is in need of her grandson’s care. The rare transplant to Falabay, Ella is originally from Glasgow and doesn’t fit in among the native islanders, even after spending the last half century as their neighbor. She doesn’t speak Gaelic, both a thorn in John’s side and a trump card to play when he wants to talk bad about her without her knowing.
Grace, Cal’s mother and Ella’s daughter, divorced John when Cal was a boy. The dynamics of their divorce settlement, confusing and hard to rationalize from the reader’s perspective, have left Grace with John’s ancestral home, where she now lives and raises a family with Uilleam, John’s older brother. Falabay: so small that the only person Grace could turn to for comfort was her ex-husband’s brother. Ella agrees to let John stay on the croft she inherited from her deceased husband, not from a place of pity or kindness, but out of concern for her grandson, believing a son should have a father in his life.
As Ella enters old age, the future of the croft that she has spent her entire adult life maintaining is in jeopardy. John, who has worked equally as hard to do the same, expects his hard work and dedication to be rewarded with permanent tenancy. But he is not her family, which is why Ella has her reservations about letting him stay on, and why John insists her care is not his responsibility.
When Cal asks his father from a phone booth in Edinburgh why his mother can’t take care of her, John responds, “with all the certainty of a man who knew the exact timing of any job to be done”: “It’s time. … You’ve had your fun.”
Better than any other writer writing today, Douglas Stuart has woven class and identity into one common struggle for endurance.
Time can’t move fast enough for Cal. The little work he takes on at the inn can’t keep him busy enough. Instead, he scans the lonely hearts columns and plots his escape.
For John, the speed at which time passes is maddening, forcing him to fight with each nail to claw back the evaporating culture and tradition of the Isle of Harris. Change brought by time and the fast money economy of the 1990s is exacerbated by wealthy mainlanders buying up property on the island and turning it into a vacation hotspot, displacing the heritage of the island at a rapid pace without the next generation to preserve what remains of it.
After a tense Sunday that begins with an argument over Cal’s hair and ends with the crack of his Walkman echoing through church service, John measures his life in an instant, calculating the sacrifices of fatherhood between waves of anger and shame: “[W]hen Cal was fourteen, Beady-Màiri had asked him if he wanted to be like his father, Cal had guffawed. Right there, right before John’s very eyes, he had told Beady, no, that crofting was a stupid, old-fashioned thing to do.” He recalls memory after memory after memory of his son’s thanklessness, and the world’s thanklessness for all that he, and men like him, have labored for. The condescension of a banker who, when John asked for a small loan to help pay the mounting bills, approved him for an amount worth much less than the debt Cal accrued living in Edinburgh.
The resentment and anger and a lifetime without gratitude finally boils over in a violent rage while John and Cal sit in the car outside the church, with Ella watching on in horror from the backseat:
Everything stopped. John twisted in the driver’s seat. 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. Cal raised his arms to shield himself, but John only paused to judge his next strike and punch around his son’s defenses.
Cal, defiant even after his father leaves him bruised and bloodied, continues his search for love, even from a place as rigid and hopeless as Falabay. He endures an embarrassing and heartbreaking correspondence with a man in Inverness whom he finds in the classifieds.
There are also the Macdonald siblings. Isla Macdonald and Cal had been rumored to be an item as teenagers, and his return to Falabay reignites that speculation. Initially, Isla seems to fancy Cal, although his love for her is purely platonic. It is her older brother that Cal redirects his romantic feelings toward. Doll Macdonald was Cal’s childhood best friend. During their mischievous teenage years, the two of them would read dirty magazines and get drunk. In a state ripe for bad decisions, Cal and Doll developed a sexual relationship and lost their virginities to one another. Since Cal left for college, Doll has stayed behind in Falabay to work on his father’s trawler, while all the others his age have left to make lives for themselves on the mainland.
In Doll, all of the tragic characteristics of Stuart’s novels are balled into one. Ashamed of his queerness, longing for a partner, and left behind by the neoliberal age, Doll has become a destructive alcoholic, which eventually leads to his public ostracization from the community. Cal seeks to rekindle both a friendship and romance with his old mate. But Doll is too far gone, initially distancing himself from Cal upon his return, in a move that readers might read as providential by the book’s end.
The only formidable connection that Cal forms is with his father’s best friend, Innes MacInnes, a bachelor who spends his days caring for his ailing father and tinkering with a ham radio. Innes knows John better than John himself, and his devotion to his best friend is as admirable as it is futile.
Cal and Innes grow close on a trip to the mainland to buy a new van for John as a surprise. Whether born out of Cal’s bottomless loneliness, or the manifestation of true attraction to Innes, Cal is enveloped by the older gentleman’s tenderness:
As Cal drank his pint he studied him. Innes’s tawny hair was tousled and there was a pleasing asymmetry to his features, a slight spoiling that stopped him from becoming too handsome. He was wearing a black leather jacket … It was the type of thing Glasgow hardmen wore, or the men who stalked the dance floors in basement nightclubs, drinking alone, standing on the periphery where the lights couldn’t reach them.
But in a turn revealed quickly to readers, it becomes obvious that everyone on this island has a secret. Cal’s is known on the first page. But the nature of Innes’s relationship with John is unwound over the course of the novel’s 26 chapters, and eventually it is their secret that the lights reach, not Cal’s.
But he is not alone in holding onto his. Grace has secrets, too, and so does Isla Macdonald, and when hers is finally revealed, it nearly consumes Cal as collateral damage, mirroring a near-identical lie that Ella has kept hidden since she came to Falabay as a young woman pregnant with her daughter.
The smaller the setting, the bigger the lie. And the more costly the repercussions.
Better than any other writer writing today, Douglas Stuart has woven class and identity into one common struggle for endurance. Across each of his three novels, queer awakening is juxtaposed by the socioeconomic identity crisis that developed in the Thatcher era. He writes of queer men finding their identities, while grieving the loss of their parallel class identity.
But queer identity survives despite neoliberalism. Despite the cannibalization it spawned in working class communities across the world, and despite the fear and obstinacy provoked by the loss of industry and pragmatic meaning in those same communities. John of John continues the literary tradition of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, while introducing a new layer of complexity to Stuart’s oeuvre, one firmly set in the ancestral traditions that shaped so much of working-class identity in the 20th century.
In one of the most climactic moments of the novel, John’s relationship with Innes becomes clear to Cal. John must make a decision, the biggest he has ever had to make, and one that seems obvious to the reader but could not be more frightening and out of character to the elder Macleod. In the aftermath, Cal realizes his father
would cling to this control until the day he died. Cal knew that his father could not move forwards into truth and there was no way to call him on his lies, to have him deconstruct himself now. He had spent his whole life concealing this truth and the conversations they needed to have would take a lifetime to eke out, years of sly, indirect allusions, only to find that after all those years—decades, perhaps—his father would still not have shifted in his thinking. Whatever lay ahead, he knew they would keep lying to each other.
By choosing the truth, John admits to the lie he’s told all along. He is nobody without this lie. It’s the lie that has defined him; he can’t live without it. 
