“I have to have something to show at the end of this life. If I’m for hell, then I deserve a love that was worth it.”
Were it not for the fact that I have a half dozen novels borrowed from the library with impending due dates (plus the new books by Doireann ní Ghríofa and Maggie O’Farrell waiting to me on my bookshelf), I might’ve finished John of John and then started it right over again. I loved both of Douglas Stuart’s previous novels, but this one is a real masterpiece.
In John of John, Douglas Stuart whisks us away from the gritty Glasgow streets that served as the setting for Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo and takes us to the Outer Hebrides. The book is set in the late 90s (or early 2000s?), but the Isle of Harris feels like it is in a world at least two decades earlier thanks to the decline of the weaving trade that has mired many of its residents into seemingly unshakeable rural poverty. Even if they’re accurately topical, mentions of Charles and Diana’s divorce and the growing popularity of email feel anachronistic on this lonely island.
Cal and his father John are two of the island’s residents. In some ways, the two men couldn’t be more different — Cal returns after doing a degree in textiles at an art college and being unsuccessful in finding work that will keep him on the mainland, but he dreams of more than the island on which he was raised. John is a crofter, a weaver, and a devoutly religious man who feels, for better or worse, deeply rooted in the fabric of his rural, strictly Presbyterian community.
In one important way, they couldn’t be more similar, although neither of them knows it about each other. Both are gay, with Cal hoping that a life outside of Harris might allow him to live this truth openly, and with John carrying on a decades-long clandestine romance with his neighbor Innes. This dual-secrecy drives the relationship between father and son, although of course they don’t know that this shared trait has such an impact on their lives as individuals and as a family.
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