Going from Angela’s Ashes to Young Mungo is like going from gin and tonic to crack. I didn’t expect to read anything more depressing about life in a tenement than AA. Now I have.
Young Mungo comes with credentials: cover photograph (above) by Turner Prize winner, Wolfgang Tillmans, and text by Booker Prize winner, Douglas Stuart. Angela’s Ashes and Young Mungo are fictional autobiographies, if that makes sense. Frank McCourt depicts the Limerick and Douglas Stuart the Glasgow of their unfortunate childhoods. Whether it is worth enduring such grinding poverty, abuse and exploitation in childhood to achieve fame and fortune writing about it after moving to the United States is debatable.
If you are reading this you will not enjoy Young Mungo. You probably haven’t had a chance yet as it was published this month. I have a signed copy, so there! Now you are determined to read it but I can put you off.
”She ran her hand along the underside of the collapsible kitchen table and felt the sharp pitted mounds of dried mucus. Mr Gillespie had liked to pick his nose after they fucked and wipe it on the underside of the veneer.” (Young Mungo, Douglas Stuart)
It ain’t Jane Austen; on the other hand it is well observed. Should you think of writing a best seller it’s a top tip to invent a hieroglyphic to represent a signature – quicker.
Now for something different. Bertie likes to show his profile.
