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The boys are of an age: Shuggie is sixteen at the end of Shuggie Bain , Mungo fifteen during the events of Young Mungo. This little scene is just a flourish, coming too late in the book to signal to readers familiar with the earlier novel the passing on of the baton in a relay race of narrative.

The intimacy between mother and son is different too. Agnes Bain in the earlier book kept up appearances, something that could come in handy: if the police happened to be looking for someone responsible for injuring a security guard while looting copper wire, they would be satisfied that the children of this well-turned-out woman could have had nothing to do with it.

She works on a burger stand rather than feeding her own family, who have to track her down there.

Graz

The fortified popular in the Glasgow area is caffeinated as well as alcoholic, in a way that fits her restless temperament. For a Protestant to drink Buckfast Tonic Wine might seem a marginally ecumenical act, since it was originally made by Benedictine monks in Devon.

One was an inability to reject or abandon his mother, always hoping that this time she would turn towards life and towards him: not a surprising pattern, since he had grown up entirely enclosed in the bleak richness of alcoholic psychology. But he will never replace Stella Artois as her favourite child.

The other inability was to put the pieces of himself together as everyone who met him seemed to do at a glance. I really do not think I can live here. It smells like cabbages and batteries. He passes through adolescence more as a stretched child than a man in the making, precocious but somehow lagging in most departments.

To the extent that he internalises significant stimuli he also hides them from himself, resisting an absorption of knowledge that would catalyse him into a new sort of being, one outside the world he knows. This mechanism is seen at an extreme when, towards the end of the book, Shuggie is sought out by a neighbour of the same age, who has ignored him up to that moment.

He rhymes with himself right down to his name — Keir Weir. Only a dripping nose and a cold sore debar him from teen pin-up status. He wants Shuggie to do him a favour, a rather demeaning one: keep a girl occupied on an unglamorous double date on the embankment of the M8 while Keir climbs on top of her friend.

This is very different from the way he is used to encountering the saliva of others, not charged with contempt but promoted to the status of toiletry product. Then Keir holds him in place, to insist on the grooming that may edge this oddity into acceptability as a decoy.

Keir provides the finishing touch to this minimalist makeover by chewing some gum then passing it on:. Reluctantly Shuggie took the wad and put it in his mouth. It was slimy and warm, and it tasted of mint and beans and cigarettes. It smelled like Keir. It was a million shades of glossy reds and a melange of dark chestnuts.

The hair slid through his fingers like silk, each strand light as gossamer. There are hints that Shuggie has other contacts, not necessarily consensual, but his actual desires have yet to move south of his neck, and even there his sensations seem to be filed away in cranial spaces that are close to imaginary — the impossible back of his eyeballs, bathed in a secretion from elsewhere, and the hardly more probable dry pocket in a wet mouth.

Mungo Hamilton is put together differently, and so is the book that contains him. He is somewhere between a pretty boy and a handsome young man, sweet-natured despite daily neglect, though highly vulnerable. His flaw is on the surface: a facial tic accompanied by a compulsion to pull at bits of his own skin from cheek or lip.

The difference between Mungo and Shuggie is efficiently shown by the scene they share outside the pawnbrokers. A workman storms out of the premises, shouting insults at the pawnbroker, who has offered him so little.