Booker winner Douglas Stuart reveals flashes of tenderness in his violent working-class men

Douglas Stuart Martyn Pickersgill/Pan Macmillan Douglas Stuart’s third novel, John of John, returns to the territory that made his Booker prize-winning Shuggie Bain , and Young Mungo , so unforgettable: the intimate violence of masculinity, and the ways love persists inside families whose members cannot speak or emote plainly to one another. In Stuart’s Falabay, an imagined town on the Isle of Harris in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, the wind batters – and people have learned to endure by saying less than they mean. Review: John of John by Douglas Stuart (Picador) John Calum (Cal) Macleod returns home from art school in Edinburgh after his father, John, hints at his grandmother’s escalating ailments. For Cal, coming home means regression and constraint. He is indebted, back under the roof of a father who insists, often with overbearing zeal, on obedience and conformity. In Edinburgh, with dyed hair, new clothes and the agency to publicly express his homosexuality, Cal had begun to assemble a new self. Back in Falabay, Cal is under the roof of his father, a man of unrelenting principle. Control is John’s dialect of love. Proximity must be earned through deference. John forces Cal to listen to bible readings: because it was too much to ask his son to call him a couple of times a week, or to sit with him by the fire for a few hours and give him all his news. Too much to ask Cal just to be near him. Intimacy and violence The Macleods are a weaving family. Stuart, a trained fashion designer, attends to the material textures of that work in imagery of the lanolin that softens and splits skin and fibres that embed themselves in the knuckles of the men. In two scenes in particular, Stuart demonstrates his skill at writing the tactile and physical. He illustrates John’s attentive care for his son, as well as his violent impulses. After Cal’s hands have been cracked and inflamed by overexposure to artificial heat in the weave shed, John makes him sit, and cares for him “as he might care for any useful tool”. Cal washed each hand before John dried them on a clean tea-towel. Then John oiled them, rubbing ointment into each knuckle, caressing the webbing between Cal’s forefinger and thumb. Cal winced occasionally, and John went slower, taking care to rub the lotion into the peeling nail beds. Later, Cal insists on returning the care and tends to his father’s own damaged hands, tweezing wool from John’s inflamed skin and cleaning the wounds. “Look at you two playing nail salons,” Cal’s grandmother, Ella, jokes – yet the intimacy here is unmistakable. Stuart writes men who are simultaneously opaque to themselves, and overexposed to the community’s judgement. John polices Cal’s appearance, forbidding him from attending church with neon orange hair, as though colour itself were a provocation. When Cal insists on attending anyway, John beats him in the car. “He braced his left hand on Cal’s lapel and with his right he punched his son three more times, each blow stronger in its fury and determination.” The beating over, he glimpses his reflection. “Now that the anger had gone, he didn’t know what had possessed him. When he looked in the mirror he saw a devil, and the devil wore his face.” The scene captures how visibility becomes a moral test in communities trained to prize conformity. Stuart refuses to excuse John, allowing him full moral agency. Something (the devil) has influenced his behaviour, but John is still the perpetrator. Despite moments of tenderness towards his son, he remains a man who harms people he loves – and crucially, who cannot and will not apologise. The novel’s most complex reality lies in a truth disclosed early, then handled with delicate restraint: John is in love with his neighbour and childhood friend, Innes. Their relationship is a long, quiet arrangement of glances and hedged intimacies, often reset by John’s fear and Innes’ patience. “I haven’t had any time alone with you since … I can’t remember when.” “Cal will be home soon. You have to be patient, please.” “Am I not the very model of self-control?” John exhaled as though blowing on a cup of hot tea. Then he nodded slowly. “You are,” he said, “you are.” […] Seeing they were truly alone, he took a step closer. He took Innes’s hand in his, and he stroked the back of it with the side of his thumb. Stuart gives Innes an eloquent verdict: “It went like this, loving John Macleod. You did it against all reason, against all your better judgement, and in that exact moment he starved the embers into submission, he had the skill to blow on them gentle and ignite them again.” Loving John is an exercise of endurance. Desire and rejection For Cal, desire is improvised and punctured by rejection. He answers a lonely-hearts ad and is rebuffed. He fixates on and tries to seduce Innes, an act of longing and misrecognition – a young man reaching for the closest possib