How author Douglas Stuart's journey to a remote Scottish island inspired 'John of John'

Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Amna Nawaz: In 2020, dogs won the Booker Prize for his debut novel, “Shuggie Bain,” said in 1980s Glasgow about a boy caring for his mother struggling with alcoholism.

His latest novel, “John of John,” out today, follows Cal, a young man returning to his hometown on a rural Scottish island and grappling with his identity, his religion, and his father, John.

Geoff Bennett spoke to Stuart for the latest episode of our podcast “Settle In.” Here’s a clip of their conversation.

Geoff Bennett: Where did this story come from. And did you know where John and Cal were headed when you started?

Douglas Stuart, Author: Yes, I actually began this novel in 2019, when I was waiting for my debut novel, “Shuggie Bain,” to publish.

I was filled with anxiety, and I’d sort of taken my fashion career and put it on hiatus, and I was wondering if that was the right thing to do to risk it on my dreams of becoming a writer. And so I was looking at my husband one day, and I said: “I have an idea for a new novel I want to write, but I have to go to the Outer Hebrides.”

And as a kid growing up in the inner city of Scotland, I’d never been to the islands. You know, it’s a — the Outer Hebrides are an archipelago of islands that sit off the northwest coast of Scotland. And they’re absolutely stunning, but they’re quite difficult to get to.

And so I think my husband was sick of dealing with my anxiety and he said: “Twelve weeks away from me sounds like a great idea.”

And so he totally cosigned me going to the islands. But I showed up on the islands in 2019 knowing only two people. And I was there, first of all, for 12 weeks. And I just sort of traveled up the islands and got a sense of my own country, a sense of the people. And I found that everybody was incredibly generous with their time.

They were curious about what I was doing, what I was interested in. And I fell in love with the place. I sort of journeyed up from — there’s a very small island at the bottom called Vatersay, and I went up about four to five islands until I got to the isle of Harris, which is almost near the very top.

And when I got there, I realized that there was a convergence of fascinating things. First, it’s the last stronghold of Scottish Gaelic, the language. It is the sort of home of a very conservative Calvinism. There is beautiful Harris tweed weaving and then there’s a crofting way of life that’s sort of dying, subsistence farming, that is not so common these days.

And when I was on the island, I just thought, this is — there is a story here. It’s this wonderful, almost lunar landscape, very rocky, quite barren. The elements are very wild. And I just thought, oh, there’s a story here.

But I thought the story was about a young man who had gone to art school. And in that wonderful moment we all have when we first leave home and we think we can expand and become who we are going to be, my protagonist is actually called by his father and says, you have to come home. Your grandmother’s sick.

And so he does the dutiful thing. He loves his grandmother very much. And so he sort of puts his own life away and he comes home to the island. And as soon as he gets home, he realizes his grandmother’s in fine health. And so something else is actually afoot.

And I thought that was going to be the novel, but on my trip when I was on the islands, I was sort of sitting at a lot of kitchen tables, just meeting islanders. And I was about five weeks into my trip, and I had heard frequently, when I would go from settlement to settlement, that there would maybe be an unmarried man or some bachelors in — or spinsters in each settlement.

And I often ask, why didn’t they marry? Why weren’t they interested in marrying? And the answer would be often, well, they missed their moment for love. The person would say, there’s a very short window and you don’t meet so many people when you live so far away, and they just missed their moment to meet that special person.

And I had been listening to that for some weeks. And I said just very casually, well, of course, some of them might be gay, and that makes it harder.

And the woman I said it said: “Oh, no, no, no, that’s not possible.”

And she was neither cruel nor homophobic, but, for her, it was just not a thing she could imagine. And I thought, oh, there’s the novel. It’s not really about the son returning home. It’s about the home he returns to and about the father and the grandmother who he’s left behind who couldn’t quite become who they were meant to be either.

Geoff Bennett: The novel gives us two points of view. You have got John’s. You have got Cal’s. We understand each man completely, even when they’re hurting each other.

Douglas Stuart: Right.

Geoff Bennett: Reading it, I thought to myself, this — I mean, you talk about the challenge. I mean, that is a Herculean task to structure a book that way. Why that approach?

Douglas Stuart: That’s a great question.

I think, emotionally, first of all, I didn’t know my own father. And I’d written two novels about a son’s relationship with his mother and how that can sort of change a life. And I went into this thinking I wanted to explore what a love between a father and a son was, almost in a completely imagined way, because I had no reference in my own life.

But I had been raised around a lot of men who would put a lot of energy into avoiding the emotional truth. They would never speak about how they felt or what their own feelings were in life. They did — the men that I was raised around did really difficult, dangerous jobs.

And I think if they started to talk about their feelings, then everything would unravel, because the very first thing you would say is, I don’t want to go into a coal mine. I’m scared. I’m underpaid. I feel undervalued.

And so, instead, in order to protect themselves and to protect the families, they would say nothing about their feelings. And so the book becomes about that in a way. They are sheep farmers. And John doesn’t express how he feels very much, but they love each other, father and son.

And a lot of their frustration is about the fact that they cannot communicate. They can’t actually say who they are and what they want and how the other lets them down. Cal feels very much like his father wants to control him.

And when masculinity is expressed very narrowly, something that fathers do is, they try to make sure their sons come out in that image and there’s sort of — it’s almost as a protective thing, that your masculinity has to be tough and macho and quite stoic.

On the other hand John, the father, feels like Cal doesn’t respect everything he has sacrificed, everything he has built, that Cal looks at their home and their farm and their croft almost like it’s worthless and it’s a bore and, who would want to do this?

And so, in that sort of misunderstanding, the men are trying to love each other, but the thing is, it was almost a sort of exercise in how — as a writer’s exercise, in, how claustrophobic could you make this relationship? How could you take these two characters that almost know everything about each other, but then won’t say the things that are sort of closest to their hearts?

And how far could I push men together in that way? They work and they worship and they eat together. They’re together all the time. And yet there’s so much they’re withholding.

Amna Nawaz: And you can watch that full episode and all of our PBS News podcasts on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.