Book review: Glasgow Boys, by Margaret McDonald

This tale of two young men trying to make their way in the world after growing up in the care system is both fast-paced and deeply-felt, writes Joyce McMillan

The phrase “care experienced young people” rolls easily off the tongues of 21st century policy-makers. Promises are made, to and about young people in care; and some of those promises are even kept.

Behind the words, though, lie whole worlds of pain and trauma, poverty and deprivation, addiction and loss, and an aching absence of the parental love and care that is every child’s birthright; and Margaret McDonald’s debut novel Glasgow Boys offers a journey into the heart of that experience, through the intertwined lives of two young boys – Banjo and Finlay – growing up in the care system in and around Glasgow.

Banjo and Finlay first meet around the age of 14, in a transitional care home where they are both briefly resident. In a gruff and silent way, barely ever put into words, the two room-mates become friends and something more than friends – almost like family, or blood brothers, who look out for each other.

Margaret McDonald PIC: Heather Callaghan

By the time McDonald’s main narrative begins, though – three years later – the two have become estranged after an incident neither of them wants to remember, and have lost touch. Banjo is living with kindly foster parents in East Kilbride, enduring his last year at secondary school and working in a cafe to make some extra money; Finlay is in the first year of a nursing degree at university in Glasgow, struggling to get by, barely able to afford to eat, and working essential extra jobs, alongside an intensive degree that involves work placements as well as study.

Despite their achievements though – Finlay at university, Banjo a star of the school athletics team – both boys are deeply damaged, not least by the brutal end of their own friendship. Banjo is beset by furious rages directed as much against himself as others, and is at constant risk of getting into horrific fights, which could end his school career; Finlay is gay, desperately shy, and so habitually terrified of betrayal and abandonment that he struggles even to strike up a casual conversation with his fellow students. And these physical and emotional experiences are described in such vivid and visceral terms that we almost live and breathe every moment with the characters; as they sweat, vomit, flush, fight, tense and race their way through a uniquely testing passage into adulthood, without the family support most teenagers can take for granted.

In the end, in McDonald’s narrative, both Banjo and Finlay are redeemed by love, in ways that seem almost too magical to be true. Yet there’s something sweet and truthful, nonetheless, in McDonald’s writing about how powerful, redemptive and transformative a first love-affair can be, in changing young people’s lives, and their sense of themselves.

And always, the stories of Banjo and Finlay unfold against a background of working-class Glasgow life that McDonald knows well from first-hand experience. Now aged 25, she describes herself as having worked in every one of the low-paid jobs described in this book, and as having written it partly as a love-letter to her home city from a proud working-class Glaswegian.

And along with its deeply-felt, fast-paced and beautifully-constructed double narrative, it’s that hard-edged sense of the economic reality of working-class Glasgow lives that gives the book much of its raw strength; and perfectly captures that glorious city of grubby back lanes, leafy West End streets, nondescript suburban hinterland, overpriced university cafes, cheap-as-chips junk food, stressed-out public services and magical moments at Kelvingrove, that those of us who know and love the place will recognise only too well.

Glasgow Boys, by Margaret McDonald, Faber & Faber, £8.99