“Ye cannae believe I don’t speak the Gaidhlip,eh?” jokes Ella, matriarch of a Scottish family in crisis and the quiet conscious of Douglas Stuart’s torrid family drama John of John. But even if you don’t know Scottish Gaelic, Stuart’s lyrical undercurrents will fill in the blanks.
Just over the rocky cliffs and rolling hills of the sheep farming town of Falabay on the Isle of Harris with quaint thatched roofs and the hinges on the closets remain rusted. it is where gay 22-year old John Calum Macleod, an out of work aspiring fashion designer unable to find a job on the mainland.
Cal had been openly gay in his student life and didn’t know if he would be able to survive under the stern Presbyterian gaze of his father, who has agreed to pay his student loan debt. He doesn’t know if he can pull of being shoved silently back into the closet. His rowdy student gay life is just the first reveal in this engrossing family drama, where such matters are not discussed as personality conflicts surface in silence and are gone with the ocean winds.
John Sr. among the herders and fabric artisans losing out as the synthetics dominate the foreign markets. Set in the 80s, the Island’s economy is driven by sheep farmers, fabric makers and weavers, and vanishing seasonal tourism.
Cal’s father is a master weaver who makes fabrics in his own home equipped fabric shop. He is also a lay preacher and prayer singer for his church. Prayers are also part of his everyday life at home, and at meals where Cal is expected to observe along with his grandmother Ella, whose secrets keep this house of cards standing in the bitter cliff winds.
Ella keeps to herself and otherwise tends to her chores around the house, feeds the men, and whispers the occasional cryptic asides, when father and son fight. John Sr is Ella’s ex-son-in-law, her daughter Grace fleeing 15 years ago. Ella is diplomatic with her rigid former son in law, and his and Grace’s adrift son Cal.
Meanwhile Cal reunites with his former best friend. As teenagers Cal and a straight boy neighbor nick- named Doll, fooled around with pretend-gay sex, calling it dares, but eventually meant more to Cal. Now men, Doll unabashedly identifies as straight, but want to renew their friendship. Meanwhile, friends are warning Cal that Doll is turning into a sloppy drunk and pissing his gang The self-destructive secrets between them whole life in inappropriate and violent ways craven ways. Meanwhile, a subplot simmers with John Sr. and Doll’s uncle Innes who throws down the gauntlet. The secrets and gossip of the Harris Isle hangs in the ocean mist and fog as Stuart brings it all to a unsuspecting denouement.
Stuart conjures feral seascapes of the Western Islands with its brutal storms brewing outside and inside, as the family dramas simmer on high, and as the secrets sit on the Highland cliffs ready to be pushed off by one of characters as the sheep look on or scatter.
The emotional suspense is brilliantly rendered by Stuart even when it pills at the seams a bit, but however wooly the plot gets, readers will be hanging on tightly woven thread.
That aside, Stuart leaves some of the questions about the fates of these characters in the hands of the readers. Cliffhangers that beg a sequel.
The novel has some autobiographical elements, Stuart was a fabric and clothes designer.
‘John of John’ is a fine follow-up to Stuart’s Booker Prize winning 1st novel ‘Shuggie Bain’ (Booker Prize winner) and ‘Young Mungo’ (2022) his second.
In his end notes Stuart thanks the citizens of the Scottish Western Islands, explaining “ …It was on this trip that I began to write what become the beginnings of this novel. And i am grateful to everyone who gave their time to talk to me. But this is a work of fiction, not a work of ethnography. Falabay lives only in the imagination, and as such, all characters, all untruths, all failings are mine and mine alone.”
