Review: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
Well, now. This book will break your heart. I mean, it’s excellent, a worthy winner of last year’s Booker Prize, beautifully observed, and you’ll adore Shuggie. It’ll still break your heart. Fair warning.
Shuggie’s growing up in and around Glasgow in the 1980s. He lives with his family in a high-rise, then a grotty house in a dying pit-town, then an east-end tenement. All the while he is dealing with an alcoholic mother and a constant chorus of people telling him he’s “no’ right”. Not right, because he dresses himself with care. Not right, because he plays with a doll. Not right because he speaks differently than his classmates, and walks “like a lassie'“.
The narrative focus begins with his mother, and shifts more to Shuggie as he grows older, but pings back and forwards between them. Their fates are interdependent, and while there are many good times, the bad times threaten to bring them all down. The sense of wasted potential lingers around the whole family.
There’s no shying away from the bitter hard edges of this life. Shuggie’s mother and grandmother are of a generation for whose women the only holiday was “a stay in the Stobhill maternity ward”. Money is scarce, housing is dirty and damp, there are so few jobs (thanks Thatcher), and there is little protection or means of escape from the often violent men they are forced to rely on.
Shuggie’s childhood was in the same city and decade as mine, but it’s a hundred miles away from my experience; Glasgow has ever been a city of huge contrasts. There were a few wee references that rang bells for me though - anyone else remember getting The Wee Red Book? The newsagent I got mine from one year made a China / Mao joke which I utterly failed to understand until years after the fact.
It’s not all bleak; there are some hilarious scenes, including when his brother is trying to teach him to walk ‘properly’ (“try and make room for your cock”), and Shuggie’s new friend telling him about her dad (“He misses ma maw.” “Is she dead?” “Aye, sort of. She lives in Cambuslang”).
The sense of being stymied by circumstance comes up again and again. There are significant parallels between Shuggie Bain and The Young Team; indeed the two authors took part in a panel on the portrayal of Scottish masculinities a few weeks ago, along with Andrew O’Hagan, as part of the Paisley Book Festival programming. Shuggie is a wonderful character. He soaks up so much of what is around him, and even while so much of it is literally and metaphorically toxic, his personality shines. I was rooting for him from the earliest pages through to the very end.