An intriguing portrait of an isolated society

John of John

Douglas Stuart

Picador

Douglas Stuart won the 2020 Booker Prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain, and he is rapidly establishing himself as a major literary figure. Born in Scotland, he currently lives in the USA, but his fiction is set in his native land where he explores the lives of ordinary people. He deals in difficult circumstances and tragic events – and John of John is no exception.

Here we have Cal, unemployed and broke having finished his degree at art school in Edinburgh and being pressured to return to his family home on the remote island of Harris by his father John on the pretext that his grandmother is unwell. And so Cal returns. His father, a domineering figure, is a weaver of the famous Harris tweed, a small-scale sheep farmer and a staunch member of the local, rigidly Calvinist, Presbyterian church. It is not a society in which Cal is going to find himself able to relax. He is gay and distinctly uncomfortable with his father’s beliefs.

His home life is difficult. John hates Cal’s long hair, his tatty clothes and his reluctance to settle down with a godly island bride. Cal’s grandmother Ella, who raised him after his mother (Ella’s daughter) deserted the family and ran off with his father’s brother, is a tough ex-Glaswegian, but devoted to Cal, even to the extent of being a suffocating presence. In Ella, Stuart has created a fascinating character who, as we learn more and more about her through the novel, becomes someone the reader cannot help relating to.

John is a man with secrets of his own, which we can begin to guess at early on, but are slowly revealed. He can be brutal, and violent, but he is essentially a figure of tragedy, and not an entirely unsympathetic one. His confrontations with Cal are inevitable, and very real. Cal looks for affection, but there is little to be had even as he turns to his father’s oldest friend Innes.

Stuart has created an intriguing portrait of an isolated society where people see themselves as at risk of damnation for any deviation from the strict Calvinism they feel compelled to follow and also at risk from the all-seeing eyes of their neighbours in a remote and dwindling community. There are wonderful scenes set in John’s weaving shed where he and Cal match the colours that create the patterns in the tweed they weave – there is plenty of sensitivity amidst the harshness and cold practicality that surrounds them.

The writing is nuanced and appealing, and the slow reveal as the novel progresses is very skillfully done. Which is why the rather sudden tidying up of loose ends and the neatness of the denouement seemed rushed, almost as if the author has had enough of island life. But John of John is an impressive and generally satisfying book. Stuart is a writer to watch out for.