In 2019, I decided to read all the Booker Prize winners. The idea was to read the best fiction in the world. Last year, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart won the Booker, but it took me a year to get to it. The story was slow, and it revolves around an alcoholic mother.
Douglas Stuart’s debut novel, Shuggie Bain, is a compelling and evocative narrative of family, class, sexuality, and optimism, filled with intriguing, complex characters. The story is set in a rainy 1980s Glasgow inhabited by a diminishing industrial class: men yearn for employment and sex while their women turn to alcohol at home. The industry is connected with masculinity itself, having been pushed to the margins by the rising middle class; poor families live in an “endless soap opera of senseless violence.”
Agnes Bain, the novel’s key character in many aspects, comes from a Catholic household but marries “Big Shug,” a Protestant. Shug had grown greedy and gluttonous by the time their only kid, Hugh (“Shuggie”), was six, and his virility had veered dangerously close to violence. He seldom sleeps at home, and Shuggie is well aware of the embarrassment that comes with knowing the sort of guy his father is. Agnes relies on alcohol to help her forget.
Shuggie spends most of his youth and adolescence in the grey, swampy Pithead, far from the city centre, where out-of-work miners and their families reside in the housing project alongside the disused mine. Agnes and her children (Shuggie and his elder sister and brother, Catherine and Leek, from their mother’s previous marriage) are outsiders, having been abandoned by Shug, who has begun a new family. Agnes, the “alky hoor,”—dresses too well and wears too much makeup for the women who gather in the street to chat and sip milky tea. Agnes looks down on them as well, with their matted hair and “mismatched bedding,” always cognizant of class and what it means to be entitled or undeserving.
Catherine marries and leaves; Leek is introverted and often goes undetected, working long days or filling his sketchbooks. Shuggie is a precocious and astute observer of the world, which reveals its mysteries to him while also highlighting his own peculiarity, his struggle to fit in. The other kids call him a “poof,” and he hunts for indications of masculinity, however little, and tries walking and talking “like a genuine guy.” He is very sensitive to his mother’s praise; he is dedicated to her and spends a lot of time caring about her pleasure.
For Shuggie, causes of humiliation abound: his inability to be “normal,” his fatherlessness, and his mother’s catastrophic alcoholism, the burden of which he is progressively bearing. Sick with the hope that she would “get well,” he hates returning home from school, never knowing what state she will be in; he and Leek play a constant game of “who touched it last.” Agnes spends a year sober, glittering with compassion and optimism, attending AA meetings; she meets Eugene, whom she hopes will support her—a guy to cook and clean for, a father to Shuggie.
Agnes believes in the potential of a new beginning, clinging to optimism even after repeated disappointments—a trait Shuggie inherited and shares, despite the fact that reality threatens to take her whole. In her worst times, Agnes wakes up trembling and vomiting in the morning, combing the home for half-empty cups of beer left unattended the night before. She can get sad, furious, or both when she drinks, and she occasionally fantasises about killing herself by plunging to the bottom of the bath “to wait for the Lord.”
Loneliness and sorrow pervade the story like wet air, but there are also moments of joy—glimmers of beauty and love in the midst of adversity, such as the numerous unforgettable passages in which Agnes turns on the radio and dances with Shuggie. Regardless of what occurred the night before, Agnes can usually get up and go down the street with her head held high most days. However, Stuart demonstrates how wide the gap between who we are on the inside and who we are when we face the world may become. When do our chances to remake ourselves expire? When will it be difficult to escape the hand we’ve been dealt in life? And what happens when we glance in the mirror and see that inner self—the one we believed was hidden—staring back at us?
Stuart’s characters are so engrossing, their humanity so wonderfully portrayed, that we are drawn into their inner selves completely and intimately. He addresses his serious topic with care and compassion—as compelling and vivid as the individuals’ lives are in Stuart’s brilliant portrayal of them, we can’t help but take them into our own hands.
You can buy the book here.