When the incomplete is more than a shadow, more than a mark in the hollows of the air; when the incomplete is a twist that survives behind language without ever abandoning the verb; when the incomplete makes that subtle rectitude germinate that tightens our hands and parts them from the chest, we come to God. To the most liturgical and nefarious god. To the God who lines with the cold sweat of those who lament their own name and cannot help pronouncing it in secret. To him we surrender naked and violent, naked and padded in front of a mirror that one day knew how to wander about love and its many parallel lights. And if the heights of God are insurmountable; if in his white dwelling the verses of salvation do not yet reverberate; if faith is a barren effort that does not ease the terrors of the body, we turn to the Father. To him and to the connotations that one day we cursed and that today have the facility to revoke what is broken. We turn to the Father to embrace his gray body and question him, to be a notch on his arm of power as life speaks in the dark. Beyond misunderstanding, only he can extract our pain, though in doing so he may also extract the foundations of happiness. In his house, under the rotted beams, among walls whose smoothness no longer dignifies yesterday but sharpens it, we rest at last. The problem arises when both encounters, the father’s with God and the son’s with the father, take place at the same time and with the same intensity, even for the same reason. Let us imagine two mirrors racing, seeking each other with extinguished desperation, that only recognize themselves in homonymy and in whose interior, amid swarms of silence, the world seems to have ended forever. “Islands —she says, one of the protagonists of the harrowing novel John, Son of John, by Scottish writer Douglas Stuart— inside islands, inside islands.” Islands, then, that become splinters within a larger splinter to which one can only consecrate oneself to ward off the pain.
And if, moreover, the island is not metaphorical but real? A space of endless shores, of lookout points from which to contemplate the wind’s commotions. With no greater hope than to surrender to the cold, the consecration to that kind of imprisoning totality is inevitable. That is how we may describe John, Son of John: as a map of inevitability, of the blood inherited and orphaned and of the individual blood, of the cages assumed in the name of fear and at whose open doors the air darkens the passages of flight. In keeping with this definition, Douglas Stuart has written a masterful novel.
John-Calum Macleod is a 23-year-old who, after studying textile design in Glasgow, returns to Harris, the island where he was born and raised, from which he fled seeking a freedom both desired and unmanageable. He returns, humbled by precariousness, to a rugged and brutal landscape, and to the farm where his father, John, shepherd of sheep and weaver, lives. John is a prominent member of the Presbyterian Church. He is also a stern man who processes obedience and a vital austerity that spreads around him like a corrosive stain. In the farm lives Ella, John-Cal’s grandmother, a sturdy and tireless woman who, despite the years and a cultivated calm between them, faces the omnipotent power of her son-in-law John.
The past has doors that stand upright. Doors in disrepair, whose splinters cut the flesh and then sew it back with verses that draw darkness. The future, by contrast, is a reverie, a yes that orbits around the present and dissolves into a foggy atmosphere that, in Cal’s case, prevents him from breaking away from his father. “He could not afford the long-distance call to the islands, so they devised a signaling system by which Cal would call home at the appointed hour, wait for three rings, and hang up. His father would call back immediately. This method required arriving early and pretending to speak to someone so that no passerby could claim the booth. It took him a while to find the perfect place to worship, a solitary booth not attached to another. When his father sang the psalm, Cal had to respond by singing it in Gaelic with all the force of his faith. But when a particularly handsome man passed by, he grew nervous and lowered his voice, and, as one might expect, John asked him why he had hesitated.”
The author of Shuggie Bain, for which he won the Booker Prize and the British Book Award, has woven (never has a verb been so apt) a novel whose layers transcend the lyrical and reside in a dimension primarily sensory, violent in many of those strokes, where colors exert a power not only visual but subjective. Colors that, seeping into the characters, abandon their grayness, their natural laconicism, to rise in an intuition, in a foreboding longing to which the reader must surrender with impatience.
The novel can, in some stretches, feel totalitarian or excessive. But soon we discover that a story like Cal’s and his father John’s, which is, as we said at the outset, a story of searches and mirrors, of resistance and desire, of versicular masculinity and love in the shadows, must be erected through a thick scaffolding, sometimes ostentatious. Scaffolding or structure, in which English and Gaelic mingle, observation and the many introspective pronouncements that bare the image of the other.
No doubt that, in this two-dimensional game, where the exterior imposes its own vocabulary against the suggested word, Douglas Stuart handles it with astonishing mastery. The construction of the characters, especially the two protagonists, is impeccable. At times, John and his son Cal cross the page’s boundary to settle, with their gestures, with their languid silences, with their organic and aesthetic aggression, secular and divine, contained and overflowing, in a space that exceeds the walls of fiction. “His father was seated in the chair, head bent forward. He held Bess on his lap; he was singing an old Gaelic song about men who set out to sea. The dog rested on his lap, like the skin of a beast at the feet of a Norse god. Cal watched his father stroke her chest and massage the body from the hip to the paws. John raised his head at the sound of the door.”
Watching John and his son, we ask to what extent inheritance, being devastating, is synonymous with identity and, at the same time, with the future. The inheritance, never embraced, never seen beyond certain evident traits and a fondness for the land —in this case, the farm and its cliffed slopes— is the great engine with which Douglas Stuart propels a story in which chiaroscuro mirrors blur without a fixed course, moved by an imperfect origin that will soon become abyssal and liberating. Nothing is superfluous in this muscular, reddish novel in which the Glasgow author drives us toward the sea and toward the carbonized earth. Nothing, and least of all characters who continue to shout when the last line dies and the reader wonders why.
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Author: Douglas Stuart. Title: John, Son of John. Translation: Francisco González. Publisher: Random House. Sales: All Your Books.