Imagine Falabay, a remote place in Scotland where Nature brooks no quarter, where the land and the sea have offered only meager employment for centuries, where an older generation still takes pride in speaking Gaelic and where, in a winking concession to the times, the bellwether ram has been replaced by an ewe on the Macleod croft now being worked by a handsome but stubborn weaver named John.
Imagine that John, the father for whom you have been named even though everyone calls you Cal (your middle name) has guilt-tripped you into coming home from a life of listless couch surfing in Glasgow after graduating from fashion school because your gran's feet have turned purple.
Imagine returning to an insular community where everyone is hiding something but there aren't many secrets except one that has been kept in your own home. Where John, who leads the congregation in song on Sundays, punches you in the face because you've bleached your already dyed long hair with peroxide instead of cutting it before accompanying him to church.
His father put all his faith in the Presbyterian penicillin. For whatever ailed you there was only one cure: work and prayer.
Imagine you've brought Ella, the grandmother who raised you, an unusual gift because she loved teaching you filthy expressions as you beach combed together during your childhood, when your discerning eye for subtle gradations of color told your father one thing and her another.
By now, you've probably guessed that Cal carries the Macleod family secret. Not so fast. Douglas Stuart pulls the rug out from under the reader, if not his title characters, almost immediately with an omniscient revelation less about sexual orientation than the very real and sometimes cringey costs of hiding it.
To pay off Cal's student debt, John forces his battered son to help him weave the wool they gather from their flock even though Scottish law allows only one person per croft to work a single loom as a form of quality control. After passing inspection, their work--which is indistinguishable, even to expert eyes--officially becomes Harris tweed, named for one of the islands in the Outer Hebrides.
In middle age, I outgrew a brown sports jacket made of the same material, ignorant of its origins until now. My own father called it "snazzy," his highest form of sartorial praise. I lamented donating the jacket to the Salvation Army as much as I loved Stuart's novel, which is just as intricately and colorfully woven, even if its resolution--which appears to have been engineered by a martyred saint weaned on romantic comedy--does defy credulity a wee bit.
But before then, Stuart thrusts the reader into a pre-internet world where rural "benders"--men who have sex with men--don't think of themselves as gay. Cal discovers his sexuality by watching videotapes with Doll, whose family isn't as religious as John.
He had liked the T’s best. T for Top Gun or Total Recall or Terminator. And it was on a November afternoon, when Arnold Schwarzenegger first landed naked in a car park overlooking LA, that Cal sat with one of Mrs Macdonald’s cushions clamped over his lap. He lied to Doll about having diarrhoea, then he went home and prayed for forgiveness, crouching behind the sunken caravan.
(No wonder queer Scots seem so hung up on masculinity! See also Half-Man.)
College cures Cal of the need to pray, and he learns something from a friend with benefits who proposes they live together after graduation.
Sammy was the opposite of his father in all things, and the moment he had realised this was the moment he realised he could never love him.
And like most gay men still in the closet, he was relieved to have a female best friend, Isla, who also functioned as a "beard."
There had been a tacit expectation, a faint, cheering hope amongst the faithful that when they were older, they might reunite, court properly, marry quickly. The sweetness of their relationship had brought him uncomplicated happiness and at the same time a sense of protection. Whenever the men looked at him with that faint unease, whenever he laughed too loudly, or stood with all his weight on one hip, she came to mind and soothed whatever doubt they had. She had been like an overcoat that let him blend in, a skinned fleece he could tie around himself that let him wander amongst the flock without fear of rejection.
Stuart anchors John of John in a place as far from "gay" urban culture as Kansas is from Oz yet much of his gripping melodrama seems oddly familiar and not only because I've taken the same ferry that Cal does when he returns from school. I had a couple of beards, our Walkmans played the same new wave music (his amusing reference to the Smiths is spot on), I've replied to a personals ad, people have told me I was in love with my father, and, like so many gay men who flee their hometown, I've faced the exact same question that drives the novel's narrative.
Will he stay, or will he go? The answer left me in a puddle of skeptical, if hopeful tears that once again had me counting my lucky, lucky stars.
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