Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It may an almighty overuse of cliché to suggest that there is beauty in suffering. Perhaps in retrospect sometimes, but mostly I believe not. However, beauty in suffering depicted as art is indeed a possibility in the hands of the right artist. And that is what Douglas Stuart does with this debut novel of his, Shuggie Bain, which is a soul crushing and yet unputdownable book of the travails of a mother and son in the working class Glasgow of the 1980’s and early 90’s.
The book opens in 1992 and a young Hugh ‘Shuggie’ Bain is eking out a meagre living in a bedsit run by immigrant Pakistanis and working at a deli counter where the owner doesn’t mind the hygiene standards much on account of the low pay the underage worker demands. He has dreams of making it to hairdressing college one day, but the grimness of his situation is evident from the off. The story then mostly goes back in time a decade to the tenements of Glasgow and a look at his family and how he ended up where he is.

That family is dominated by his mother, Agnes, a fiery concoction of defiance and grief who is also the beating, injured heart of this story. Initially living with her three kids and second husband, Shug Bain, in a tenement high rise with her parents, Agnes’ problems have at their root the specter of unfulfilled or thwarted desires. Initially married to a well-heeled and responsible but, according to her, utterly dreary individual, she runs off with the taxi driving philanderer who is her current husband. Unfortunately, the way she got together with him is a precursor to their life together. His wavering eye and callous disregard for her after a point drives her further to the despairing hole she digs for herself with all the Lagers and Vodka that are a constant accompaniment in the story. Hoping to get her away from the drinks, Shug moves the family to a pit village, an enclosed dwelling of dreary homes far away from the action of the city.

But the place is a cesspool of disaffection and disillusionment. The closed mines and insular families with unemployed “men rotting into the settee for want of decent work”, a harsh political statement against the Thatcher years. In this space, the drink is one of the few escapes left to inhabitants, and whatever resolve Agnes has is quashed by the surroundings and the fact that her husband virtually abandons her and the family. It doesn’t help that plenty of ‘helpful’ neighbors are willing to partake in her addiction in return for favors or vicious gossip. Of her children, one escapes into marriage far away while the others try to soldier on, mothering their mother and keeping her from fatally harming herself. Shuggie, meanwhile, has problems of his own. Apart from parental duties to his mother which no boy should be needed to go through, he also starts realizing that he is ‘different’. The bullies target him not for his mother’s alcoholism, which is a common enough affliction in the social strata they belong to, but for the fact that he walks, talks, acts differently and because he likes things which the average boy of the time and place were not expected to like. His brother, Leek, himself an unfulfilled artist going around with a college letter of acceptance from two years ago, tries to teach Shuggie the ways of being ‘manly’ though to not much success. As Agnes goes through brief periods of lucid sobriety, there is a crushing inevitability to her relapse each time. The culture of ‘normalcy’ is so ingrained into the community that sometimes it is even seemingly well-meaning suitors or the rare decent man who may lead her down the path back to alcohol fuelled oblivion. Poverty, joblessness and addiction are toxic bedfellows and the author based it on his own experiences growing up in the Glasgow tenements and his relationship with his mother who passed from alcoholism when he was 16. The sign of a great book is the relatedness one feels despite never having lived in the place or lived through the time the story is set in. And here we feel it. The desolation and bleakness of life in the tenements and the pit village is remarkably portrayed with a grittily effective gaze without ever letting the descriptions consume the characters.



I read somewhere that the author was rejected by 32 publishers before he finally got the story published. I can’t fathom why. The themes here may be grim, but it is written with such page-turning verve that I would call this a work of genius. Once I picked it up I couldn’t let it go without figuring out what happened next to these heartrendingly effective characters. Agnes is portrayed with such immense warmth and empathy that we live with her through the demons in her mind which drive her to her Lager. There are some vivid scenes that remain etched, like that of her, finding nothing to pawn for drinking money after using up her benefits dole and having no money for the bus, walks the whole stretch across busy roads into town wearing the mink coat which is all she has left to sell off. There is burning shame that she tries to hide by proudly dressing up and making sure she doesn’t look the worse for wear ever even when buses stop for her expecting her to get on. Another is the point early in the book where she, embracing Shuggie, lies in bed with him while a fire she inadvertently set off almost consumes them. The hopeless despair of her kids when they realize she has relapsed again. Shuggie’s steadfast loyalty and love in thinking that, in spite of the obvious predictability of where this is all heading, he can still save her. It is a telling portrait of the sometimes hopeless love that children feel for their parents at times and the belief, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary, that things will get better one fine day.

The Booker shortlists and longlists are usually filled with some quite impressive titles, but I don’t often end up loving the ultimate winner of the prize. But in awarding the 2020 Booker to this book, I can safely say that I’m immensely pleased and for once it actually is the best book I have read in recent times. This is a riveting portrait on the depths of despair we can plunge to and on how sometimes love is just not enough.


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