Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

I sometimes struggle with my perception of Booker Prize-winning books: will they be ‘too clever’ for me, or will they open my eyes in ways that ‘lesser books’ fail to do? Will I go beyond the covers with a truly open mind, or do I embark on the fictional journey with baggage in my mind telling me that it will either not be as good as other learned people say it is… or it will be even better?

I had picked up copies of Shuggie Bain in Waterstones a number of times, read the blurb and picked though a few of the pages, before deciding that the colloquialisms and sometimes impenetrable Glaswegian phrases would be in the ‘too difficult’ box for me to understand. Then, one day, I set these worries aside and went for it, proudly carrying my copy back to my lovely house in the Worcestershire countryside before settling down and quickly descending into a world of addiction, poverty and hopelessness.

Shuggie’s mother, Agnes, is an alcoholic – a condition which becomes worse as we turn the pages on a helpless situation. Rejecting her first husband and moving her family out of her parents’ tiny flat in Glasgow to a former mining community on the city’s edges felt like a one-way street with few real alternatives to left or right. Shuggie effectively becomes his mother’s carer, and the development of that gentle, caring nature accompanies a discovery and awareness of his own sexuality. We care for Shuggie because he is doing his best in the face of remorseless poverty of kitchen cupboard and spirit.

It would be easy to assume that Agnes’s alcoholism renders her far less to blame for what unfolds in the book than the addiction itself; this is compounded by the fact that Agnes is a beautiful-looking woman – and plenty of men look, and take, and leave, including Shuggie’s father. Thankfully his half brother does what he can for Shuggie before, like his sister, seeing how hopeless the fight is to rescue Agnes, he can clearly see that he needs to save himself. However, I found Agnes somewhat superior and not a little arrogant, which made her even more of a target to be knocked down by just about everybody she came into contact with.

Set mainly during the time of the Thatcherite mine closures in the early 1980s there are some obvious parallels with ‘Billy Elliot,’ although I found the grinding poverty of working-class existence and joyless resistance to change controlled by others far more compelling on these pages than on a silver screen. There seem to be no silver linings here, even when we meet Shuggie again some ten years later.

I did indeed struggle with some of the language, but clearly that is the essence of the book’s authenticity. I found the unrelenting darkness of the novel hard to see through for much of the time and I cannot say that it was a joy to read; certainly not ‘beautiful’ as one or more of the Booker judges described it. However, Shuggie’s resolve in the face of all that ‘life’ threw at him, from desperate hunger to bullying to loneliness to the possible sexual violence he too would encounter in the future, was as incredible as it was heart-breaking. 

I believe the book was better than my learned friends indicated that it was, and I feel that my horizons have been suitably stretched way beyond the hills I see from my window; like many readers of this book, I’m sure, I thank my lucky stars that they, along with time and space, shine down more brightly on me than the subjects of such frightening shadows.

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