For diehard romantics, Douglas Stuart's new novel offers an epic tale of gay love and loneliness in the Hebrides, charting an uneasy homecoming against a backdrop of repression. The Booker winner's latest work, John of John, tells the story of 22-year-old Cal Macleod, a gay Harris islander who returns home after studying textiles in Edinburgh.
The novel opens with a strange ritual: Cal's father, John, a precentor, reads to Cal in Gaelic from the New Testament and has him sing back with full belief. The verse urges the faithful to guide the errant and stay vigilant against temptation. After receiving Cal's assent, John orders him home, ostensibly because his maternal grandmother, Ella, is sick.
Set within a tight-knit Free Presbyterian community in the 1990s, John of John is a reprise of the parable of the prodigal son. It explores the half-lives of queer men condemned to love, pine, and suffer in silence. The novel is intimate yet epic, blending pastoral drama, familial fracture, love story, and inquiry into loneliness—between fathers and sons, lovers, man and God, and a small place and the big world.
Father and Son Conflict
John disapproves of Cal's appearance, his sartorial choices, and his long, flame-colored hair, disturbed by the confused signal between masculine and feminine. Cal's disinclination to be saved creates a rift that later erupts in violence. Meanwhile, childhood friend Doll gives Cal the brush-off for being away so long. Wearied by his ultraconservative environment, Cal takes a fancy to his dad's sole friend, confirmed bachelor Innes MacInnes, struck by his gentleness and benevolence.
The Secret Love Affair
This cannot be the merry May-December romance Cal wishes. Innes and John are lovers, we learn early on, and their tortured relationship since teenage years—kept secret from everyone, including Cal—forms the novel's center of gravity. Masters of discretion, John and Innes are, to townsfolk, neighboring sheep farmers. Their routine involves ensuring they are alone before drawing close, and Innes loudly seeks John's assistance for a two-man job to avoid suspicion.
The novel tries their bond in various ways: Cal's presence, John's other liaison with a married man, and the tenancy of Ella's house soon to be transferred to Cal's mother. Innes floats the idea of John moving in but intuits that a life together seems no consolation. John is tormented by his depravity: he loves God and Innes, but God hates how he loves Innes. He entertains the possibility of a family with Innes and Cal, but even in fantasy, the thought of Cal being gay remains unimaginable.
Themes and Critique
The novel is outstandingly canny and wrenching on self-contempt, the toilsome art of deceit, and the contradictions we all contain. As secular values gain ground, John and Innes living together could deal a death blow to their local congregation, leaving us wondering whether John and Cal will come out to one another. Stuart also touches on crofter subservience to absentee landowners, mainlanders' scorn, and the Western Isles' place in the English imagination.
John of John is enthralling, but the ambient Weltschmerz and characters' frequent self-pity can be draining. Stuart's first two novels, Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, were feats of heartfelt, operatic storytelling, with emotions that felt guileless and real. Here, Stuart leans heavily on melodrama and sensationalism as a shortcut to tragedy. Towards the end, the novel is eventful to a fault and surfeited with pathos: a pregnancy, an attempted shotgun wedding, a death, and a momentous departure from the island.
While this book may not appeal to those with a low tolerance for excess, diehard romantics will find much to love. Cal, John, and Innes—knottily entangled and imperfectly endearing—will be cherished with readerly devotion. And that is no small feat.
