An Open Wound
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Boyhood, David Keenan, White Rabbit, 2026, 352 pages, £23.
John of John, Douglas Stuart, Picador, 2026, 416 pages, £20.
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‘The rain was slanted, driven by the type of westerly that hurried the seas and slowed all the boats. As the harbour grew more distant, there was a rare break in the clouds and the dull sky split open above the low town.’
Although Cal returns to the Isle of Harris ‘dripping wet’ from a storm that rocked his ferry and nauseated his stomach, John of John, Douglas Stuart’s third novel, is a ‘rare break in the clouds’. A rare break from the traumas of his previous two, a rare break from hopelessness and the misery of manhood in post-industrial Scotland.
No such breaks can be found in David Keenan’s Boyhood. Aaron, on the cusp of adulthood, seeks to avenge the kidnapping of his brother – appropriately named Nemo. Using messianic powers called ‘remote viewing’, Aaron joins the dots between a chorus of characters and their stories across cities, across time, all of whom seek to find themselves and their paths in an often cruel world. In his portrayal of various men, Keenan takes masculinity into dark places, the taboo, the terrifying. Keenan’s characters like the corrupt politician Andrew Lethal, the Nazi soldier Josef Noth, and even a paedophile represent heinous modes of masculinity. Depicted through wild caricatures, this presentation of masculinity in turn leads to a shallow and over-sexualised portrayal of women – one that is genuinely hard to read and displays the troubling misogyny and male gaze we try so often to hide from, such as when Josef lusts over a waitress and ‘cannot imagine, for a second, what her interior life might be like.’ I would love to read a version of Boyhood in which women had more agency – or at least a nuanced voice. But this is not a novel of agency, nor one of realism. All the characters are augmented, blurred, fragmented, and what we are left with are colourful puppets performing the most hostile form of masculinity.
In Boyhood, Glasgow itself becomes an angry young man not just because it is full of them but because of an intricate mythology focused on masculine histories. The novel delves into the story of St Mungo and goes on to build a library of references to other patriarchal mythologies like the Maya, the Conquistadors and the ancient Greek soldier Xenophon through which the characters attempt to find philosophies to help them understand their anarchic world. The central plot focuses on the conflict between Glaswegian Roma communities but this plotline is interspersed with other stories and timelines – from dancers and anthropologists to the poets of wartime Paris. This bending of time coupled with the expansive mythological threads suggest that we have always been this way, that this kind of tribalism dates back to the dawn of man, that masculine lives have always been fraught with war, crime and misogyny. These histories bleed into the present day narrative in a bizarre sacrificial burial: ‘that’s some Mayan shit right there.’ In this way, Glasgow becomes an ancient arena for angry young men and we wonder if it will ever change. Elsewhere in Scottish literature, gender still plays out in the ruins of that same arena; thirty years after Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh’s 2025 follow-up, Men in Love, continues all the same themes of class, violence and addiction. As the Nazi Josef says: ‘the world will always be the same.’
Douglas Stuart’s Isle of Harris is a stark contrast to Keenan’s Glasgow. In John of John, protagonist Cal returns from university on the mainland with little to show for it. Despite the hardships of a shrinking economy, religious pressure and masculine expectations, particularly in relation to his queerness, John of John remains full of warmth and beauty as Cal moves through the island and its community in a quieter, gentler plot than Stuart’s previous works. The characters are deeply connected to Harris: ‘this is the palest part of me and even here it’s the colour of pearlwort, maybe crowdie’, says Cal. As a family of weavers, Cal and his father, John, are attuned to colours and, despite John’s stringent Calvinism and bouts of aggression, a softer masculinity often prevails: ‘John would bury his nose in Cal’s crown and inhale the fresh air.’
In John of John, the hardness of masculinities is always a pretence, an austere shell in conflict with softer innards. John, for example, is hidden even in the way he moves: ‘Cal saw how there was a conflict in his gait, like he wanted to hold himself with dignity, like he wanted to run.’ Secrets are an important plot point in John of John, unravelling across the novel, and yet it is the tenderness of the male characters that is most surprising. Stuart’s women also have more agency, encouraging the men to release themselves from masculine pressure. Cal’s grandmother, Ella, is cheeky and troublesome, speaks much more candidly than the men, holding them accountable: ‘listen, son, if the women round here just left it, this place would be nothing but men living in caves, scowling out at the sea.’ Ella is also the only character able to openly address queerness – despite a level of homophobia, she implores Cal to ‘make yourself happy, son. Christ above, let one of us be happy.’
While the men of Boyhood learn through mythologies of war, the men of John of John learn through the webs of a strong, complex and intergenerational community. We learn about the characters through a Derridean différance, the play of how they see and speak to each other, how they define themselves against one another. How John sees his ex-wife Grace through a supermarket door, how Cal fills silence by thinking ‘about the radials of John’s irises.’ The bonds of a crofting community is reflected through relational dynamics rather than interiority or pure portraiture. Of course, these bonds are also claustrophobic as Cal struggles to disentangle himself from John’s inadequate masculinity and from the social pressures of the community.
And yet through this thick weave of masculine pressures, Stuart pulls through a thread of warmth: ‘he took him in his arms and for a long time they did nothing more than hold one another, safe in the darkness of the old house, warmed by the glow of the immersion heater ticking away in the airing cupboard at the top of the stairs.’ This queer love, coupled with Harris’s beauty, takes the edge off the pains of masculinity, pressing a warm compress against broken hearts and angry mouths.
This tenderness is absent in Boyhood, where Keenan explores a post-modern, post-punk nihilism. There is beauty in Boyhood but it is always ruined, like when Aaron’s friend Scott is attacked by men who ‘tore right through his beautiful eyeball (sapphire blue) and destroyed it forever.’ And it is the Nazi Josef’s thesis that poetry is war, that the natural state of the world is violence, that men will always tend towards the bacchanal. ‘I went to war because of a poem I read,’ he says, struggling to disagree when a writer friend questions ‘if there is poetry in the obliteration of the world.’ Zooming out to a structural level, even the form of the novel commands a violent chaos: the narrative is non-linear and broken up into fragments, many of which are speculative, or at least hyper-real. The fragments are juxtaposed, confronting, jarring – a visual discomfort that enacts Josef’s philosophy.
The marketing material for Boyhood centres around the word ‘joy’. Whilst there is certainly a magic, a kind of awe at the chaos and power of sex or family or violence, it is definitely more ‘awe’ than ‘joy’. There is friendship, there is love, and yet it is always contextualised by trauma – as if tenderness is only made possible through suffering. The corrupt politician Andrew Lethal even philosophises that there is a ‘relationship between suffering and access to the sacred.’ This is echoed in the characters who can perform ‘remote viewing’ and thus gain some kind of power from suffering. As such, Keenan presents a much grimmer portrait of Glasgow and of masculinity than Stuart. He has little sentimentality: it’s all rawness, scratching at an open wound to uncover a deeper, grittier, messier portrait of Glasgow as an angry young man. Keenan has previously noted his inspiration in James Joyce, something that comes through his structure and voice, but also in how novels are a performance, how sensationalism and magnification can actually lead us closer to the truth of a matter – the real Glasgow. The truth of masculinity might always be somewhat horrifying, and maybe it is a privilege that Boyhood is so hard to read. It’s a privilege, certainly, to not know violence, to be shocked by horror, to not be surrounded by these kinds of misogynist, homophobic and aggressive men.
And yet the men of Scottish literature must not always be this way. In Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies, the group of men are, like Keenan, punk-loving Glaswegians, and yet their sense of community and warmth is much greater. They are ‘soft as Tunnock’s Teacakes, sentimental as sherbert.’ Belle & Sebastian’s Glaswegian frontrunner Stuart Murdoch also just published his debut novel, whose protagonist describes his world as ‘quiet and warm’ and Glasgow as this ‘lush green place’. These examples denote a substantial departure from the extensive tradition of hyper-masculine Scottish literature, such as the Glaswegian drunk of Sammy in James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late, who traverses Glasgow with the same anger as Keenan’s Aaron – and the same fear of policemen. Or the corrupt immorality of Joe Taylor in Alexander Trocchi’s 1954 novel, Young Adam, in which he inhabits a Camus-esque detachment interrupted only by harsh sexual exploits as depicted in Boyhood. The title of the novel, despite having no actual character called Adam, is astute to problems of masculinity that reach deep into Scotland’s history – a man’s fall from grace, his erring from his original, sinless form. Boyhood, essentially, is one knotted narrative of erring and sinning.
Sin is still a problem in John of John, and yet the novel moves towards hope akin to O’Hagan or Murdoch. But the tenderness of the novel is not naïvely redemptive; it cannot save Cal, cannot save John, cannot save Harris, and yet moments like the ‘immersion heater ticking away’ bring us a rhythmic calm, a soothing sense that things might just be okay. Even the way Cal dyes his hair and once wears a dress suggests that Scotland’s masculine pressures might be waning ever so slightly, that queerness itself can start to dismantle the hostile architecture of masculinity that too often upholds the aggressive, the misogynist or the immoral.
It is not that either novel submits to having a ‘thesis’ about masculinity, or Glasgow, or Scotland, or the ideas of nihilism and hope. Each author simply holds a looking glass towards the fabric of manhood, and Stuart’s glass seems to catch the light a little more. At the opening of John of John, ‘God sent dawn over the rocks’ – and it is this process of dawn that Stuart brings to Scottish literature, that slow, hopeful movement of the sun rising over the horizon, of light and mercy dawning over the conventional darkness of contemporary literary fiction.
Maybe it is Stuart’s queerness, as well as his love and respect for women that brings this softness; he speaks often of his love for Agnes Owens or Janice Galloway, and especially of his own mother. Keenan is certainly successful in a theatrical and boundary-breaking presentation of Glasgow as an angry young man, but Stuart’s Isle of Harris gives us just a little more belief in the fabric of Scotland to nurture its troubled young men.
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Laura Baliman is an Edinburgh-based writer who studied English at Cambridge. Her fiction and criticism have been published in Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Wales, Ache, The Skinny, Gutter, SICK amongst others. She took part in the 2023 Edinburgh Art Festival’s Emerging Writers Programme and is currently a poetry editor for The Selkie.
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