"The book opens with the two conducting a strange ritual over the phone, performed regularly ever since Cal moved to Edinburgh to study textiles: John, a precentor, reads to Cal in Gaelic from the New Testament and has him sing back with the full power of his belief. The verse John recites which prefigures the novel's themes of repression and self-denial urges the faithful to guide the errant and to stay vigilant against temptation. After receiving Cal's assent, John orders him to return home, ostensibly because Cal's maternal grandmother, Ella, is sick."
"By the time this question is posed to 22-year-old gay Harris islander John-Calum Macleod, or Cal, in Douglas Stuart's new novel, there is a sense that Cal is his father John's beyond the ordinary claims of blood the latter's sway containing undercurrents of domineering ownership. John lives with Ella in her croft house, she is his ex-wife's mother and thus not his responsibility. Set within a tight-knit Free Presbyterian community of farmers, weavers and fishers in what appears to be the 1990s, John of John tells the story of Cal's uneasy homecoming."
"It's a reprise of the parable of the prodigal son and an ardent exploration of the half-lives of queer men condemned to love, pine and suffer in silence. Intimate yet epic in scale, it contains equal parts pastoral drama, tale of familial fracture, love story and inquiry into various forms of loneliness: the loneliness that can reside between fathers and sons, between lovers, between man and God, and between a small place and the big world."
A Gaelic greeting frames a question of belonging as a father asserts ownership over his gay son. A ritual of Bible reading and singing over the phone reinforces vigilance against temptation and urges guidance of the errant. The father orders the son to come home under the pretext of a sick grandmother, while maintaining emotional and moral authority within a tight-knit Free Presbyterian farming community. The son’s appearance and refusal to be “saved” create a growing rift, shaped by tension between masculine and feminine signals. The homecoming echoes the prodigal son, focusing on repression, self-denial, and loneliness between fathers and sons, lovers, and God, with the conflict later erupting into violence.
#free-presbyterian-community #queer-identity #religious-repression #family-conflict #scottish-highlandsouter-hebrides
Read at www.theguardian.com
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