Young Mungo

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapter 1

Part 2, Chapters 2-6

Part 2, Chapters 7-14

Part 2, Chapters 15-20

Part 2, Chapters 21-28

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Nicknames

In Young Mungo, most characters go by nicknames, not their given birth names. The notable exception is the characters that are closest to Mungo. Characters like Jodie and James do not go by nicknames because no emotional distance is needed between who they are and what they mean to Mungo.

Mungo has a complicated relationship with his brother Hamish. Though Hamish protects his brother, Hamish is violent and impatient with Mungo, eager to mold him into a tough and brutal street thug. Hamish goes by the nickname Ha-Ha—an ironic nickname given that Hamish’s life is full of darkness.

Mungo has two nicknames for his mother: When she is sober and even kind, she is Mo-Maw; when she is drunk and belligerent, she morphs into Tattie-bogle. This allows Mungo to separate her two personas and therefore remind himself that Tattie-bogle is a frightening but temporary state of being. Tattie-bogle is the Scottish slang term for scarecrow; applied to Maureen, the nickname signifies that when drunk, she is only a simulacrum of a person, hollow on the inside.

Mungo’s primary antagonist has the fitting nickname Gallowgate—the entrance to the gallows where prisoners are executed. The narrowing nickname properly foreshadows Gallowgate’s evil and cruelty—and his rape and near-murder of Mungo. St. Christopher, Mungo’s secondary antagonist, has an ironic nickname. The Christian martyr St. Christopher is the patron saint of travelers and lost children, but the novel’s St. Christopher terrorizes and sexually assaults Mungo. Together, St. Christopher and Gallowgate’s nicknames indicate an almost biblical trial for Mungo on the way to maturity.

Rural versus Urban Settings

Young Mungo takes place in two different settings: The grinding urban wasteland of Glasgow and the idyllic countryside of Scotland. These settings are important motifs throughout the novel. The countryside is ripe with promise; it is beautiful, peaceful, and neat. But this beauty is juxtaposed with the violent and horrendous abuse Mungo experiences there. Though Mungo is in awe of the animals, canopying trees, and gorgeous lake he sees for the first time, the countryside’s isolated and unpatrolled emptiness allows Mungo to be brutalized by his human predators. This nightmarish juxtaposition demonstrates that it is people who wreak havoc on a world that has the potential to be pure and beautiful.

The city of Glasgow, specifically the neighborhoods of the East End, is differently isolated. Glasgow is diverse, but the East End is predominately poor and working-class. People who live there don’t experience the cultural life of the city; rather, the novel portrays the East End as an almost inescapable trap, a place informed by poverty and violence. East End residents replicate cycles of violence, abuse, alcoholism, unemployment, and young parenthood. The setting of Glasgow symbolizes the ways society oppresses individuals within it.

Pigeons

James’s doocot (dovecot) is a structure symbolic of compassion and hope. The pigeons represent the future and demonstrate the human capacity to both enslave and nurture. The doocot itself is important to James because it is one of the only things connecting him to his father, as the building of the doocot was a partnership born from their grief about James’s mother’s death. The doocot also represents safety and secrecy—it is where James and Mungo can meet one another in relative peace, away from the hateful eyes of their society.

James takes good care of his pigeons. He loves, feeds, and kisses them—actions that show that James is kind and compassionate, despite his environment of bigotry and violence. His treatment of the pigeons explains why Mungo falls in love with James, who is one of the few men still capable of accessing their feelings in East End. Extending love to animals highlights James’s vulnerability and his lack of interest in becoming another street gangster.

However, the pigeons also represent the ways Mungo and James are trapped in East End. In literature, birds are typically symbols of flight and freedom; here, their captivity in the doocot echoes the psychological tethers that keep James and Mungo in Glasgow. When Mungo is forced to kill an injured pigeon, it is the symbolic low point of Mungo’s life—unlike the patron saint that he is named after, whom Mungo loves for bringing a dead bird back to life, all Mungo can offer as mercy to the pigeon is a quick death.