The language of silence

Booker Prize winning author Douglas Stuart arrived in this edition of Festivaletteratura to present his latest work John of John. The novel, set in the 1990s, follows the story of Cal, who returns to the Island of Harris shortly after graduating from college, prompted by his grandmother’s illness. His return also brings him back into contact with his father, reopening a complicated and emotionally distant relationship. The novel explores queer identity, the working class, repressed masculinity, and isolation in rural communities.

The loneliness experienced by homosexuals in 1990 was particularly acute in rural and isolated communities, with few spaces in which queer identities could be openly expressed. Stuart wanted to explore this isolation through an unusual family dynamic: the possibility that both a father and his son could be gay, neither of them realising it about the other.

Families have long fascinated Stuart. Raised by a single mother who died when he was sixteen, and never having known his father, he spent much of his life observing other families. He sees them as both wonderful and potentially suffocating: events that happen to one generation can hold every generation that follows in place. In John of John, Cal and John work, worship and eat together, yet remain emotionally “oceans apart.” Cal has robbed John of his past, while John, unknowingly, is robbing Cal of his future. The novel explores the painful tension of people who love each other deeply while becoming, at the same time, the worst thing in the world for one another.

Stuart further reflects on how transmuting personal experience into fiction has been essential to his survival and emotional processing. Writing requires an author to decenter himself, which fosters profound empathy. Through characters like Agnes Bain in his debut novel Shuggie Bain, a story drawn from his own personal experience, he uses writing to broaden his understanding of human nature and family dynamics.

Language and dialect are central to Stuart’s writing. He does not believe he can create literature that is separate from the people he writes about. If he were to write in the Queen’s English, he says, he would almost be observing his characters from the outside, “as if they were animals or creatures.” Instead, he writes in his natural tongue, embracing and celebrating the language of his community.

For Stuart, dialect carries much more than accent: it reflects class, oppression, identity, and the ways people choose to present themselves and wish to be perceived. This commitment to authentic language was also a barrier to the publication of Shuggie Bain, which was rejected 44 times, partly because publishers feared readers would not understand its dialect. For Stuart, however, that very language is what makes the story truthful and gives his characters their voice.