The two Johns in the title of Douglas Stuart’s new novel refer to a father and son. The son is our main protagonist, John-Calum Macleod, thankfully referred to as Cal in the text to avoid confusion. Cal is a recent graduate from art school in Edinburgh who, unable to get a job due to an economic downturn, has been crashing on friends’ couches or relying on the occasional hook-up for shelter. One day his father, John, insists that Cal return home to take over the care of his grandmother, Ella, who lives with John despite being Cal’s mother’s mother. So Cal returns to his family home in the Outer Hebrides. John Macleod is a crofter, meaning he runs a small farm on unsuitable land, raising sheep and cultivating wool for weaving. It’s a hard way to make a living, one that Cal had been desperate to avoid when left for school, and he is reluctant to return to life in his family home.
Besides the difficult lifestyle, another reason Cal is so hesitant to move back in with his father is that he’s been keeping his sexuality a secret. John is a strict Presbyterian, a leader in the local church, and Cal is terrified of how he would react if he discovered that his son way gay. Of course, John has secrets of his own that he has kept from Cal, including the real reason Cal’s mother left them so many years ago. And both men are largely unaware of the machinations of Ella, a woman with schemes of her own to keep the family together and secure the future of the croft.
A lot of John of John is taken up by the plotting of these three people who have such trouble communicating with each other despite living in the same small house. All of them are taking action due to inaccurate assumptions based on incomplete information. They each believe that their secrets are truly secret, and Stuart deliberately slow-plays the revelation of which ones are actually wholly known by the others. There’s craftiness and cleverness in Stuart’s composition, to be sure.
However, I found reading John of John a largely unsatisfying experience. I had trouble really buying the reality of some of the “secrets” that come to light. I’m reluctant to discuss in detail because they would spoil a lot, but some of the characters’ actions seem really far-fetched. Furthermore, through his actions, Cal’s father John becomes so thoroughly unlikeable that, to me at least, he became irredeemable, and this rendered the novel’s final act hard to invest in. I felt like Stuart was focused squarely on the parts of the story that I was least interested in, and largely ignoring those that I cared about.
While John of John is a skillful portrait of a unique way of life in a part of the world unfamiliar to most, the dourness of the plot and it’s constant reliance on miscommunication and deception eventually wore me down.
