Review of SHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas Stuart

 4.5 Stars

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and I will be disappointed if it does not win.   What James Joyce did for Dublin, Douglas Stuart has done for 1980s (Thatcher-era) Glasgow.  (I would suggest that readers look at the photos of 1980s Glasgow taken by Raymond Depardon; some are available for viewing online.)

The novel, beginning in 1981 and ending in 1992, covers Shuggie from the age of five to sixteen.  A sensitive, lonely child, he endures regular physical and psychological abuse because of his effeminate mannerisms and interests.  Besides bullying, he has to contend with having an absent father and an alcoholic mother.

The focus is on Shuggie’s relationship with his mother Agnes.  Unhappy with her life, Agnes takes solace in alcohol.  Her self-destructive journey leaves her family even more impoverished.  Her two older children, Catherine and Leek, look for ways to escape so Shuggie is left to care for her.  Much as he tries, Shuggie is not able to help his mother, and despite periods of sobriety, her addiction continues to spiral out of control.

This is very much a novel of character.  When she was a child, Agnes’ father treated her like a princess, and she believes that her life should be so much more than it is.  Though she is beautiful, her father speaks of her having a “selfish devil” inside her.  In her pursuit of happiness, she leaves a stable husband and takes up with a man who promises her a more exciting life but ends up being a philanderer who has no difficulty abandoning more than one family.  Angry and sad, she resorts to drinking which makes her vulnerable to predatory men.  Regardless of her situation, she is a proud person:  “Everyday with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high.  When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world.  When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise.”  When sober, she shows herself to be full of love, but when drunk, she manipulates those she loves.  In the reader, Agnes arouses complicated emotions.

Of course, Agnes’ actions have an effect on her children.  Leek, for instance, walks with “hunched shoulders . . . around his ears.  . . . It was getting harder to get up in the mornings, to let the day in, to come back to his body and stop floating around behind his eyelids, where he was free.”  Shuggie loves his mother unconditionally and cares for her as best he can.  Before he goes to school, Shuggie leaves a bucket beside her bed should Agnes vomit; he also “arranged three tea mugs:  one with tap water to dry the cracks in her throat, one with milk to line her sour stomach, and the third with a mixture of the flat leftovers of Special Brew and stout that he had gathered from around the house and frothed together with a fork.”  He hides pills, razors, and knives so she cannot harm herself.  He helps her maintain her dignity in public and tries to protect her from “uncles” who come to take advantage of her.  He lives in a perpetual state of anxiety; returning home from school, he listens at the door to determine his mother’s mood.  Leek tells him, “’She’s never going to get better.  . . . The only thing you can save is yourself.’”  Despite his brother’s warning and Agnes’ many broken promises to give up drink, Shuggie never gives up hope that his mother will get better. 

The bleakness is almost unrelenting.  The description of Glasgow, for instance, is depressing:  “Glasgow was losing its purpose . . . Thatcher didn’t want honest workers anymore; her future was technology and nuclear power and private health.  Industrial days were over, and the bones of the Clyde Shipworks and the Springburn Railworks lay about the city like rotted dinosaurs.  Whole housing estates of young men who were promised the working trades of their fathers had no future now.”  Agnes and her children live in a housing scheme at the edge of a shuttered colliery:  “In the distance lay a sea of huge black mounds, hills that looked as if they had been burnt free of all life.  . . .  The burnt hills glinted when they were struck with sunlight, and the wind blew black wispy puffs from the tops like they were giant piles of unhoovered stour.  Soon the greenish, brownish air filled with a dark tangy smell, metallic and sharp, like licking the end of a spent battery.”

There are touches of humour, albeit rather black humour.  One woman’s child is away from home in a special school which allows her “to dedicate more time to raising her favourite child, Stella Artois.”  When a friend tells Shuggie he should fight for his mother, he retorts, “’I do fight for her!  . . .  Mostly with herself, but it’s still a fight.’”  At the end, he tells another friend, “’My mammy had a good year once.  It was lovely.’” 

The book includes a lot of working-class Scottish slang so readers will encounter words like dreich, girning, sleekit, boak, skelfy, papped, and gallus.  A glossary would have helped because the dictionary on my Kindle didn’t have definitions for a lot of the argot. 

This novel is not for the faint of heart; it is a gritty, harrowing, heart-breaking read.  Its examination of the complex relationship between an alcoholic parent and a child is realistic, empathetic, and powerful.  It will leave the reader drained and numb, but in awe at the author’s accomplishment, especially considering that this is a debut novel. 

Note:  I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.