John of John by Douglas Stuart

🎧 Paired Listening — To Wish Impossible Things by The Cure

🌊 Acqua Alta — +100 (Boots on!) 

📖 Read On The Shore, Any Shore

John of John by Douglas Stuart begins with John Calum Macleod (Cal) returning home from art school on the false pretense that his granny, Ella, is sick. His father, John, calls him from the house, where he runs the family croft (farm) for sheep and wool. The setting is the remote 1990s Isle of Harris in Scotland's Outer Hebrides. When Cal arrives home, the tension between him and his father is palpable and uncomfortable. The whole island of Harris, where Cal, John, and Ella reside, is home to a handful of residents who treat Cal with disdain and tease him for returning with nothing to show for his time on the mainland. It’s typical “returning to a small town after your stint in the big city” fare. 

Cal is in a rough place, mentally, and makes a series of questionable choices in an effort to stake his claim on his own identity, against his father who is seemingly trying to claim it himself. You can see them both acting out of love, but also fear. Both father and son are suppressing queer identities in a strict community defined by intense Calvinist austerity. The story examines rural poverty, family legacy, queerness, and the well-trodden theme of coming home.

I should start by saying that John of John was not read in a vacuum, but was rather the second book I was able to get my hands on from the Booker Prize longlist that was just announced last month. With that in mind, the book will be judged alongside its competitors. I was pleased with this novel; it was an easy, pleasant read. But the atmosphere was thin at times; it wasn’t like other Booker Prize-winning texts I’ve read before, and it certainly paled in comparison to the atmosphere of Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman, also on the Longlist this year. In John of John, Stuart does take some tropes, such as the returning home to find yourself, and he spins them a bit, but not enough to where they aren’t still being used. Don’t get me wrong, the pacing was great, the scenes were vivid, and the characters were well-rounded. I just felt that there were some moments where I was taken out of it, a bit. There was a corniness to some of it that didn’t sit well with me. Not that corniness is bad, but corniness can often mean taking the easy way out.

Pedigree accounts for much of the buzz surrounding the book's announcement. Stuart won the Booker in 2020 with Shuggie Bain, so a third novel that returns to working-class Scottish life, family, faith, and masculinity, this time on the Isle of Harris, was always going to get attention. The novel also landed an Oprah's Book Club pick and was a finalist for the Orwell Prize, compounding the sense of inevitability around it. So the "shoo-in" feeling I picked up on is a mix of the known quality of the author for a prior win of the Booker, and the hot-button thematic focus. Plus, the marketing muscle from Oprah’s pick, which landed right as the Longlist dropped, couldn’t have hurt. 

None of the above should be taken away from the words on the page, the text itself. I still recommend this book, but it doesn’t appear to be one that will stand the test of time.