Shuggie Bain review – finally a worthy Booker Prize winner
Any time-traveller arriving in Britain this winter could be forgiven for thinking they’d landed in a particularly odd fever-dream of the eighties: Princess Diana is all over the news, pie-crust collars and shoulder pads are all the rage. There are even thousands of TikTok videos of teenagers cutting their hair into mullets, a latest fad.
But amid our fixation upon a sea of designer ball-dresses and cardboard-Queen impressions is Shuggie Bain, the 2020 Booker Prize-winner by Douglas Stuart. It is a rare breed, in that it is a Booker novel that is actually worth the paper it is printed on (Girl, Woman, Other – awful, The Testaments – even worse, Milkman – so, so, so inexpressibly boring).
The book follows the life of its eponymous character: Shuggie Bain, a young “wean” growing up with his alcoholic mother Agnes, his absent, violent father “Big Shug”, and his siblings Leek and Catherine. The novel’s fabric is eighties Glasgow: the family moves from Sighthill – a high-rise housing estate which had already fallen into disrepair by the time Stuart’s novel begins, and is now demolished – to Pithead, post-industrial, grey-scape mining suburb, and later to a tenement flat in the East End. With each new move, the family fractures and shrinks; Big Shug leaves to start a new family, Catherine emigrates to South Africa, and Leek escapes across the city. The novel begins and ends with Shuggie Bain living alone on the South Side.
This picture of familial disintegration and flux matches the city’s instability: houses are exchanged and swapped as jobs are lost and industries fall with nothing coming to take their place. Many of the novel’s men are taxi drivers. The routes they weave across the city from South to North and night-club to suburb knit the novel together; Glasgow is as much a living, violent, and flawed a character as any other.
Stuart’s novel is one of deprivation and difficulty: Agnes’s alcoholism gives the text momentum as each day is a struggle to pay for booze or food, or a struggle to stop drinking long enough to get past the shakes. She is raped, manipulated, and taken advantage of – and, in turn, she manipulates and makes life difficult for her children. Stuart does not engage in a sentimentalised portrayal of poverty and addiction; at points, the details feel too real and painful to be fiction.
At the centre of the novel is the relationship between Shuggie and his mother; whilst every other child, husband, or boyfriend leaves Agnes, Shuggie stays – and suffers for doing so. His devotion is one of transcendental love, and transcendental terror: the depictions of his everyday anxiety for the state he will find his mother in – and the state it will leave him in – are some of the most harrowing in the book. Shuggie is fostered alike by adoration and fear.
It is tempting to say that Stuart’s unflinching commitment to the minute details and large-scale miseries of poverty and addiction is a contemporary match for Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: “done because we are too menny”. There is more than one moment in the novel that gives the reader such a visceral, physical moment of shock and despair. But, whilst Hardy’s saga has a touch of melodrama, Stuart’s novel is all the more heart-breaking for its mundane details. The novel ends with Shuggie helping a friend attend to her alcoholic mother; there is a palpable sense that a similar story could have been told about many other faulted families.