Hello! I’ve had a little rest from posting in January, but I am back and ready to go. I am continuing my goal of reading all the longlist Booker Prize nominated books from 2020 and to kick off 2021 I’ve started with the winning book, ‘Shuggie Bain’ by Douglas Stuart. It is story of toxic relationships, abuse, addiction, neglect and poverty set in 1980s Glasgow. While the narrative is about Shuggie, his love for his mother and growing up gay, it is as much, if not more, about his mother Agnes and her spiralling alcoholism. The effect on her children: Catherine, Alexander (Leek), and Shuggie is a truly raw exploration of the pain and paralysis of alcoholism and poverty. If you think you’ve read about these themes before, think again – Stuart’s rollercoaster of a novel will leave you gasping for breath, closing your eyes and wondering when the rollercoaster will come off the rails.
Shuggie, fifteen, is introduced in the first part, ‘1992 – The South Side’, where he lives alone in a boarding house. The opening line sets the scene of bleak oppression, ‘The day was flat.’ This simple sentence is followed by a semantic field of negativity – ‘abandoned’, ‘listlessly’ and ‘vacant-eyed’. Shuggie’s out of body experience with his ‘soul floating’ initially leads to the possibility of hope with a new day at the end of the paragraph where he ‘thought only of tomorrow’. With a dream of going to hairdressing college, Shuggie runs the deli counter to support his ‘digs’ and counts himself lucky to have the room. Within the boarding house where ‘he could smell the musty overcoat of the yellow-toothed man who ate only what smelled like buttered popcorn or creamed fish’ Shuggie searches for his identity staring in the mirror as ‘he tried to find something masculine to admire in himself.’ It is hard to see how the desperate ingrained despair of the past can lead to a new life for Shuggie.
The narrative shifts to the past, 1981 – Sighthill, where Agnes Bain, proud and beautiful, is described as ‘To be thirty-nine and have her husband and her three children, two of them nearly grown, all crammed together in her mammy’s (Lizzie) flat, gave her a feeling of failure.’ This failure extends to the men who are described as ‘rotting into the settee for want of decent work’. The deprivation is furthered in that ‘it would take an eternity to pay off a pair of children’s school trousers or a set of bathroom towels’. Agnes’ second husband, Big Shug, a Protestant taxi driver, is loose with money and ‘a selfish animal’; he dissolves any hope Agnes may have, fuels inevitable gritty conflicts and Agnes’ alcoholism that are shocking and sad to read.
The narrative progresses in time from 1981 to 1982 – Pithead and 1989 – The East End, coming full circle at the end in 1992 – The South Side. There are many scenes that haunt the reader long after completing the novel, such as the abuse Agnes endures from Big Shug in her alcoholic state ‘the hardened hairspray cracked like chicken bones as he wound his fingers into the strands. With a tug hard enough to rip handfuls out by the roots, he started up the stairs, dragging her behind him.’ While the novel is at times overwhelmed with similes, such as the ‘chicken bones’ above and the description of Anges ‘abandoned behind the door like a ragged draught excluder’, it is these comparisons that linger. These volatile vignettes result in Agnes’ attempt to escape, no more than when she ‘held out a glowing cigarette to the curtains’ while holding Shuggie close to her in an attempted suicide. The juxtaposition in the description of this scene with the ‘grey smoke’, the ‘orange flame’ and the ‘greedy fire’ with her ‘complete calm’ is chilling. The fire is beautiful with ‘dancing shadows on the walls and the paisley wallpaper came alive’ while Agnes and Shuggie waited for death in the ‘new beautiful silence’. It is abundantly clear that Shuggie loves and trusts his mother completely and is fearless in the face of the fire. It is this love that is so heart breaking as Anges’ deepening alcoholism grinds away any potential hope.
Equally, seventeen year-old Catherine is attacked when trying to find Leek at the pallet factory by ‘many hands [that] moved on to her body, roaming and searching’ threatening her with a ‘silver fishing knife’ that would leave her with a ‘Glasgow smile, a scar from ear to ear’ or even raped. The description intensifies as the ‘gutting knife rattled against her teeth’. The scene is desperate, made worse by her realisation that ‘the men standing around her were only boys, younger than her and probably younger than Leek’. The ingrained abuse of women from such a young age further emphasises the hopelessness of the narrative and it is unsurprising when, early on, Catherine marries young and moves to South Africa without looking back. Leaving her brothers to cope with Agnes is an act survival for Catherine; it creates a sense of hope that the cycle of paralysis can be broken.
However, leaving Leek and Shuggie with Agnes is bleak. Agnes oscillates between alcoholic oblivion and times of vague coherency in the all too vivid description when ‘She lowered her head into the cavernous bag and tilted it slightly to her face. The children watched the muscles in her throat pulse as she took several long slugs from the can of warm lager she had hidden there.’ Is there any hope for Shuggie? He regularly misses school to care for his mother, heartbreakingly described: ‘With a practiced finger he reached inside her mouth and hooked out the bronchial fluid and bile. He wiped her mouth clean and lowered her head safely back on to her left shoulder.’ Equally is his struggle with his identity in a masculine world and wonders: ‘Was this the moment that would make him normal?’ While most of the novel follows Agnes’ story, it is Shuggie’s absence in the narrative that is so telling of his neglect.
With the dialogue written mostly in dialect, the inclusion of slang and simple hard-hitting prose, the novel paints a detailed picture of Shuggie’s life growing up in Glasglow. I would highly recommend ‘Shuggie Bain’, but be prepared for the no holds barred exploration of Agnes, Shuggie, Catherine and Leek, their relationships, poverty, abuse and alcoholism, and persist to the end to see if they are able to realise their hopes and break free from the paralysis that consumes their lives.
Themes: family, dysfunctional family, abuse, addiction, coming of age, poverty, neglect, religion, violence, masculinity, bullying, unemployment, prostitution, gambling, loneliness, hopelessness, redemption, hope, mother-son relationship, sexuality, identity, class, status, aspiration
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