Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
Genre: LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Catriona’s thoughts: Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo has been described as a queer Romeo and Juliet set in the early 1990s in sectarian Glasgow. Stuart tells the story of fifteen year old Mungo Hamilton, a Protestant, as he begins a relationship with James, a Catholic. Mungo explores his sexuality with a softness and tenderness that contrasts with the harshness of his family and his hyper-masculine surroundings. Their relationship is careful and considered, and Stuart refuses to overly sexualise or fetishise the young boys as they attempt to come to terms with the consequences of their cross-community love. The pace of their interactions feels almost slow at points, reflecting the tentative nature of their forming relationship.
Most captivating to me was Stuart’s portrayal of Mungo’s familial relationships as we are dropped into a family where each child deals with the consequences of their mother’s absence and alcoholism. Stuart tells a vulnerable and heartbreaking story about the relationship between a child and parent, Mungo and his mother, Maureen or Mo-Maw. Their relationship is so carefully depicted, and Stuart resists villainising her alcoholism, neglect, and selfishness. He approaches their relationship with a tenderness and without judgement, just as Mungo sees her. She is at once completely devoted to her children but also completely self-absorbed. She does not parent him but instead uses him as a source of validation and love when the men in her life chose to no longer provide this. She dotes on Mungo, clearly favouriting him over her other two children, Hamish and Jodie, who seem to see through her behaviour, as a result of their age. Mungo remains blindly loyal to his mother, to Jodie’s frustration, who has arguably been more of a mother to him. We see Mungo grapple with his devotion to his mother despite her neglectful and abusive behaviour. It is an inherent human need to seek the love and approval of our parents, no matter who they are, what they have done, or what they haven’t done. Growing up often means seeing them falling from their super-human pedestal and seeing them as flawed individuals just like anyone else. We see Mungo beginning to realise this and accept that his life will not change unless he leaves.
What connects each of the Hamiltons and James is a longing to escape and leave their surroundings. Mungo’s world is pretty bleak and his interactions with James are short reprieves from their brutal and abusive surroundings. These are scattered throughout like little droplets of hope for a different kind of future for both Mungo and James. Stuart does this just enough to keep us hanging on, and hoping, until the end.
Myra Breckenridge by Gore Vidal
Genre: Satire
Rating: ⭐⭐
Alice’s thoughts: “I am Myra Breckenridge, whom no man will ever possess.” I’ve never read anything like Myra Breckenridge before. Not only because it was written in the 1960s about a transgender protagonist, but because it’s an absolute mindfuck. Set in a post-Sexual Revolution Hollywood, Myra Breckenridge follows its eponymous protagonist as she attempts to ‘make it’ on the big screen. In her pursuit of this dream, she becomes a teacher at her uncle’s school, the Academy for Aspiring Young Actors and Actresses, and becomes embroiled in a twisted love triangle with two of her students, which predictably ends in disaster. Written entirely through diary entries, the reader is privy to Myra’s inner-most thoughts, which mostly concern the destruction of the gender binary for the sake of humanity’s sanity.
Tackling themes of gender, with an emphasis on masculinity in American culture, pop culture, and sexuality, Myra Breckenridge is full of ideas which remain at the fore of the public consciousness. However, this must all be taken with many grains of salt. Vidal represents Myra simultaneously as a radical thinker but also violent and vindictive. It plays into harmful contemporary narratives about transgender people, and the protagonist goes on a few blatantly anti-semitic rants that mirror Vidal’s own public opinion on Jewish people to the extent that it’s hard to believe it’s fiction.
My views on the book are almost as confusing as the book itself. While I think a lot of what Vidal touches on is interesting and nuanced, it lacks clear ideological intent, and it’s hard to figure out what the author wants us to take away from it. You can tell that Vidal wants to be provocative, but I can’t figure out who he’s trying to piss off more: progressives or conservatives.
CW for the book: transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, anti-semitism
The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Fee’s thoughts: If you’d told me in January that my book of the year for 2024 would be a novel about sheep farming in Cumbria I’d have assumed you were at it, but here we are.
The Borrowed Hills is no bucolic pastoral tale; rather this is an unflinching look at farmers struggling to hold their lives together in the wake of the foot and mouth crisis at the turn of the millennium, and being pushed to do incredible, previously unthinkable things. The result is an almost mythical story as wild and lawless as the American Old West.
The comparisons of Preston’s writing to Cormac McCarthy’s are justified: Preston’s prose echoes McCarthy’s in its passages of eye watering brutality, perfectly balanced so that just when you think you might not be able to take any more your horror is interrupted with a palette cleanser of the most elegant, emollient lines describing the shades of a sunset here, the curve of a shoulder there. The use of Cumbrian dialect forces you deep inside the head of the protagonist, creating a reading experience so immersive that when you put the book down it feels like coming up for air.
A savage and beautiful elegy for a way of life that’s slowly disappearing, and an unbelievably compelling debut.
Poor Things by Alasdair Gray
Genre: Literary Fiction
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Hope’s thoughts: This is a tricky one. It’s similar to when someone says ‘this TV show is the best, you just have to get through the first couple of seasons.’ There’s some bits of real great humour, and I’ve been told it gets better on a re-read, so ask my opinion again in five years.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Genre: Literary Fiction
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Adina’s thoughts: Winter time may make one wanna cuddle with a loved one on their couch, but as the cold seeps into my bones, nestling in the gaps between my ribs, I turn towards things I truly trust to make me feel cozy: books about angry, jaded, edgy, artistic young women that comfort me in the knowledge that there’s someone out there, fictitious or not, who lives a more unhinged and obnoxiously disorganised life than me; and the nameless main character of Ottessa’s TikTok phenomenon My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the perfect one to deliver this message to me, and make everything feel alright.
The writing style is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and I suppose that if I were to draw up a category of books centring the lives of tense and highly strung womxn who also happen to be incredibly good looking and bursting with artistic potential but letting it meaninglessly ooze out of their cerebrums, I would pair these two books up. I would even go so far as to daydream of a fictional cosmos where Moshfegh’s nameless character and Sylvia’s Esther Greenwood are frenemies, because, let’s be honest – they would never form a real, genuine connection.
But I digress.
What My Year of Rest and Relaxation does really well is present us with strong characters we can’t help but psychoanalyse, or, at the very least, try to understand… but not like. The author came out and admitted her work to be “a pin-up for the fightback against the notion that characters have to be likable”, to be read, I presume, and she’s absolutely right. All of the fictive individuals I came across I resented for one reason or another, but this cerebral reaction only fuelled my need to continue reading the book. They were addictive, cool, and romanticised, and I wish they weren’t.
For Ottessa’s experiment to give 100% effective results, the main characters’ looks should be an unmentioned afterthought, or, better yet, plain, average, somewhat pleasing, but unsightly looks. It’s only then that I’ll find out whether this character mystifies me to the extent that she does because of who she was written to be, or because of her Tumblr-esque allure loyally provided by her impossibly long, blonde hair and hollow cheeks that I can vividly conjure to my mind every time she inhales smoke from a cigarette, or pops one of her prescription pills.
But is this a book I will read again, you may ask.
Absolutely.
Without a shadow of a doubt I will return to it like one returns to a toxic family member… and I have – twice. The second time around, though, I couldn’t finish it. Every time I go into my makeshift creative office and I sit down at my computer to, of course, formulate very intellectual thoughts, I see it looking at me, and I know what it wants.
There are 70-odd angry pages left, but I know exactly what they’ll say.
The way that each word will break my heart, then lethargically patch it back up with a plaster in a lazy attempt to numb it, is a most familiar sensation. They want me to move on and leave them all behind, maybe even perform my own year of rest and relaxation, but I can’t… I won’t. The nameless character penetrated the walls of my psyche, and when I no longer feel her presence, I open the book back up.
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