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.

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........

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