Douglas Stuart has just finished soundcheck when he calls me from a dressing room at Union Chapel in London. It’s the evening before his third novel, John of John, is published in the UK, and the 49-year-old author is in the midst of a mammoth tour. “I haven’t had a day off in three weeks,” he says. “It’s been full on.”
Author tours are now par for the course, but Stuart’s is a blockbuster affair, with 16 dates in total across the UK and Ireland. Of course, John of John is a blockbuster book: the follow up to the Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain and the bestselling Young Mungo, it’s been heralded as Stuart’s finest novel yet. It even received an Oprah Winfrey co-sign, becoming the 123rd book selected for Winfrey’s influential book club.
The acclaim is deserved. While Stuart’s previous novels were set mostly in the East End of Glasgow, John of John sees the author turn his gaze north west to the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Harris. Set in the early 90s, the novel follows John-Calum Macleod – known as Cal – a broke 22-year-old gay art school graduate living in Edinburgh, who returns home to Harris after his father, John, informs him that his grandmother, Ella, is unwell. John is a difficult and dominant man: a sheep farmer, weaver and a devout follower of the Free Presbyterian church who has never left Harris, he cannot understand his son’s foppish hair, his religious apathy, or his disinterest in the work required to maintain their croft.
Forced back into the closet in such a tough, unforgiving and conservative community, Cal wonders whether companionship, or at least a hook up, can be found in any the island’s lonely men. His father, meanwhile, is battling with his own homosexual desires: for decades he’s been secretly involved with neighbouring sheep farmer, Innes. For such a devoutly religious man, the relationship is torturous – as Stuart writes, “He loved God. He loved Innes. He loved God and God hated how he loved Innes.”
As their secrets fester, the relationship between father and son is tested by a culture of silence, stoicism and duty. Stuart counterbalances any misery with an emotionally resonant and immersive narrative, and characters who, despite their loneliness and shame, remain desperate to be seen. Still, John of John resists the consolations of an emancipatory coming-of-age or coming out story – the regret and repression of its characters are as deeply etched into the island as its wind-carved cliffs. “The intergenerational memory of [Harris] is astonishing,” Stuart says. “The truth is, these men are still bound by the land, and they will still be bound by the church. And so change will come very slowly.”
In the acknowledgements of John of John, you explain that began writing the novel during a visit to Outer Hebrides in 2019. What was it about that visit that ignited something for you?
Douglas Stuart: It was in the period before Shuggie Bain was published and I was thinking I should write something else. I grew up in Glasgow in poverty, and so I had never seen very much of my own country. I went to the Outer Hebrides thinking that maybe there might be a novel, or a story there. If nothing else, I would have discovered more about my own country. It was almost a little bit of an indulgence. All the islands have a very different culture and I wasn’t sure what I was searching for. I started on the southern island, down in Vatersay, and I travelled up the archipelago. I eventually arrived in Harris, which has a convergence of really fascinating things: the tweed weaving, the old changing way of crofting, the Gaelic language, and, most importantly, this very devout form of Presbyterianism. The other islands don’t have those things. I arrived at the lunar landscape on the east coast and there was something spellbinding about it. It’s a very diluted landscape. The houses are few and far between. It’s very rocky, with a very thin layer of topsoil. I just thought, ‘God, people living here are really holding on.’
I never knew my father and lost my mother when I was 16 […] I was suddenly the only person in my family lineage
Not since reading The Remains of the Day have I read a book where silence and duty seem to erode away at characters with such devastation. Why did you want to explore those themes?
Douglas Stuart: My personal biography is quite well known. I never knew my father and lost my mother when I was 16. When you’re orphaned that young, you lose everything. But that moment was also a rupture that ended my sense of belonging to anyone else. I was suddenly the only person in my family lineage. And so I’ve been curious my whole life about what it means to still have parents and grandparents. What do you owe them? How much of yourself do you get to be and how much do you have to be a part of this family unit? I’ve been watching my friends go through struggles the past couple of years when it comes to caring for their parents or grandparents as they age. I almost have a voyeuristic take on it because I’m not going through it myself. But all my work has been about caring for someone when they’ve been at their worst: Shuggie cares for a mother who’s trying to destroy herself, and Mungo and James [in Young Mungo] are trying to care for each other in a world that’s hostile to them.
With regards to the silence: I grew up in Glasgow and men were so silent. We did everything to avoid talking about emotional truths. We were carrying a lot of frustration, a lot of feelings of being unloved and unworthy. To deal with that, I think we just didn’t talk about anything. So John of John became a way of asking, ‘How can I have two men living in a house where it’s so close that it’s almost claustrophobic, where they work together, worship together and live together, where they love one another, and they cannot say the thing that will free them or change everything for them?’
All three of your novels seem to focus on people or communities who have been left behind or abandoned by neoliberalism. Why is that an ongoing preoccupation for you?
Douglas Stuart: When I was growing up in Glasgow, unemployment was at 26 per cent. The government knew that and did nothing to help the community. I watched men really struggle to make a living. And I knew the government didn’t care. So, in a way, you’re right: all my novels have been about communities under threat. Island life is always under threat. The reason why I set the novel before the internet is because the internet revolutionised the islands. It meant people could go there as remote workers or have second homes there. You could work and be connected to the mainland. The problem is the islands need balance. They need young families with young children to keep things moving along. And, much like what’s happened in Cornwall, mainlanders have come along and driven up property prices. Now young people can’t afford homes. They can’t afford to stay. That means businesses can’t have year-round workers or find enough people for industry. I wanted to record that.
But I’m not a polemicist; I’m a novelist. I draw life as I see it and try to show all its complexities
Religion in the novel is depicted as this oppressive force, but it also gives characters meaning. How did you strike that balance?
Douglas Stuart: In Scotland we think of Free Presbyterians as very hard people. But in my time on the islands, I discovered it was more complex than that. These are very gentle, family-focused, community-minded, kind, generous people, who just believe in a very hard path to God. They believe that we’re all born in sin and going to hell, but that God, through the doctrine of predestination, will choose some of us to save. You can ask God or Jesus to save you, but that might not make you one of the chosen. I was fascinated by the duality between these kind and gentle people, and this hard religious belief.
But I’m not a polemicist; I’m a novelist. I draw life as I see it and try to show all its complexities. I think homosexuality and faith have been a struggle throughout my entire life. Church is very powerful in Scotland, I have always been gay, and I have deep respect for faith. But I understand that faith doesn’t always think that I’m living the right life. The Free Presbyterians are so devout. The words they use are the ‘inevitable word of God’, meaning God can never be wrong; everything He says is absolute. As such, homosexuality is a sin, but it also doesn’t exist. That’s why I write about these three queer men, because for decades, maybe centuries, anybody that was queer on the island, whether they were in the church or not, was invisible. I was trying to make this a very domestic problem for a family. It’s a very common thing to write a book, I think, about a young gay son returning to a Christian or a conservative place. But what I realised is actually the story is not about Cal; the story is about all the people he left behind.
I don’t find John of John a dark novel at all. I just think it’s a book about a family that has kept secrets too long and hurt each other with the secrets
Both Cal and John are trapped by the secrecy surrounding their sexualities, and for Innes it is the root of his loneliness. None of them, really, make a grab for sexual liberation, even towards the end of the novel. Why did you resist a traditionally emancipatory coming out narrative?
Douglas Stuart: That’s a cliché. Also, as an urban writer, I had to submit to the heartbeat of the islands, which is slow and considered. I couldn’t rush in, as I did with Young Mungo. The other thing I was wrestling with is that being gay and having an attraction to other men are different things. Gay is a social term about sexuality that’s also about how you identify in a community. It comes with other assumptions about interests and intersections. Of course, Cal believes himself to be gay because he’s been to art school in the 90s and he’s come up after the AIDS epidemic and he’s seen Madonna. But John doesn’t have access to a gay community. He would never even think of himself as a gay man. John has an attraction to other men and that, to him, is a sin.
I went into John of John expecting the level of harrowing events that feature in Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo. But while there is violence, and awful things do happen, the novel isn’t as centred on sexual or violent abuse. Why did you want to strike a different register with this novel?
Douglas Stuart: Young Mungo is about that terrible blood libel of the time which promoted this idea that boys were always safe around adult men. It was before we had any reckoning for how boys were being abused. And yet at the same time, we looked at young queer people and would say, ‘Why do you want to grow up to be a pervert?’. I had always been so angry about those two things coexisting.
Once I finished writing that book, though, I wanted to be gentler on the world, and I wanted to be gentler on myself. John of John is about familial disappointment, it’s about duty and care, and I think that’s kind of what called me to the islands. When I talk about that heartbeat of the islands, I think I could sort of hear it and feel it. I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can write another novel in the city that deals with something quite dark.’ I don’t find John of John a dark novel at all. I just think it’s a book about a family that has kept secrets too long and hurt each other with their secrets.
John of John is out now. Douglas Stuart is currently on tour. Tickets are available at www.douglasdstuart.com.
