Writing a piece the other day about the history of the Carnegie Medals, I realised that I had missed last year’s winner for writing. Time then to put that right. And I can now attest that it’s an emotional rollercoaster.
Finlay and Banjo have both grown up in care. Neither has ever really known family life although Banjo’s current, saintly, foster parents are doing their damnedest. Their circumstances are different. Banjo is back at school (sometimes) and Finlay is now training to be a nurse although self-funding is causing him worrying problems. The novel has a split time frame between “now” and three years ago.
Both boys are damaged, vulnerable, unhappy and angry although it manifests in different ways. Neither really knows how to form any sort of friendship or relationship. Anyway, who wants to? Anything which seems good is bound to be snatched from you so you might as well bust it up now – with violence, anti-social behaviour, silence, withdrawal or lies. Margaret McDonald has a real knack of getting inside their heads so that we understand – really understand – their thinking and flawed reasoning. In that sense Glasgow Boys reminds me a little of Melvyn Burgess’s Junk which also won the Carnegie Medal (2021) and remains the only thing I’ve ever read which helped me to understand heroin addiction.
Banjo and Finlay meet in a facility three years earlier in St Andrews and are room mates. Very gradually they form the nearest thing to a friendship either of them has ever known. Although Finlay is gay and Banjo is not, this is simply friendship. There is however, nothing simple about it. There are issues of trust born of a lifetime of being unable to rely on anyone and eventually there is a shattering rift, the exact details of which McDonald drip feeds with great skill though the memories of these boys now in their upper teens.
There are some wonderful characters in this novel. Paula, Banjo’s foster mother is the epitome of kindness understanding and reasonableness, Anger, or even irritation, is foreign to her. Akash the medical student, Finlay is falling in love with is a delight and he has a stable family home so Finlay begins to understand the dynamic. Meanwhile Banjo works part-time in a café where he makes friends with Elena and slowly morphs into her boyfriend. She too has a very stable, welcoming family. When Elena is hospitalised with Crohn’s Disease ( interesting quasi “subplot”) her father, Carlos, welcomes Banjo into her hospital room as “part of the team” and that’s quite a moment.
Of course none of this happens straightforwardly. Both “Glasgow boys” suffer repeated setbacks which they recognise as being their own fault but neither is super human enough to get systematically on top of the issues. They need help but they’re conditioned not to discuss their feelings.
So will Finlay and Banjo meet and repair their friendship? I’ll spare you the spoilers. Suffice it to say that this warm hearted, intensely perceived, moving novel ends hopefully.
Glasgow Boys was published by Faber & Faber as young adult fiction. It wouldn’t have qualified for the Carnegie Medal for Writing, otherwise And Margaret McDonald, incidentally, is at 27 the youngest ever winner. I have read many hundreds of novels written for children and young adults over the years and I used to say that the writing is subtly curtailed so that you can sense immediately which genre you’re in.
Bernard Ashley is a retired South London headmaster, author of many prize-winning books who came, at my invitation, several times to schools I taught in. And I once heard him talking to a teachers’ conference about gang warfare in the East End which featured in one of his books. Of course, he said, these people would have been swearing in every sentence but you can’t do that in a children’s book so you have to find other ways of conveying the mood.
That would have been about 1985. Forty years later expectations are completely different. Glasgow Boys is authentically gritty. Finlay and Banjo speak exactly as they would in real life. And as I read, apart from the main characters being young adults, I had no feeling at all that this was a book targeted at teenagers. The distinction has disappeared and, on balance, I think that’s welcome.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
