Book Review: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

There are lots of places I’d love to visit. I’ve been lucky to see many corners of our shared home, some of them thousands of miles from my corner of North London. But there is so much more left for me to explore. And this is only the world as it is now. Imagine the joy of being able to travel not just the world as it is now but the world as it used to be; to visit other places but also other places at other times.

Obviously that kind of time travel is eminently possible. That is what books are. And it’s safe to say that some places seem a lot more fun to hang out in than others. Early this year I read Douglas Stuart’s 2020 Booker Prize winning novel Shuggie Bain. It transports the reader, in spectacularly immersive fashion, to the wilderness of post-industrial 1980s Glasgow. More accurately to the fringes of Glasgow — to Pithead — where the eponymous hero of the book lives for the majority of his foreshorten childhood. In my imagined world of time travel tourism 1980s Pithead would not get many stars on TripAdvisor. It is unrelentingly, unfathomably grim.

Perhaps the first thing that struck me about the book was how distant the Glasgow Stuart describes felt. I’ve been to Glasgow a number of times. I liked it. It has a kind of austere, spare, unassuming grandeur. There is an edge to it that makes it intriguing to a visitor. On my first visit I had a genuinely excellent pizza. Shuggie’s Glasgow is not like that.

The events of the book take place through the 80s and early 90s. Were it not for the fact that Shuggie’s father drives a taxi (with an engine) you could be mistaken for thinking that meant the 1880s. Stuart’s description of the crippling, squalid poverty evokes Dickens’ London more than the 1980s of Hollinghurst or Amis. One of the characters has his teeth pulled out in his early teens so he doesn’t have to deal with the indignity of being too poor to get proper dental treatment. That character wouldn’t yet be 50 if he were alive today. To call it Victorian feel unkind to those who lived a century and a half ago. That is partly what Stuart is trying to achieve. The cognitive distance is generated by a story set in a corner of the UK that society chose to ignore and degrade. Chose to strip away the dignity from by removing all the jobs, the social security net, and by extension the hope, solidarity and cohesion. Glasgow was the petridish for the worst excesses of Thatcher’s atomising agenda of toxic self interest and self loathing. Here we see and feel the consequences.

All is left behind is considerably less than the sum of its broken parts.

The story is told from the perspective of Shuggie — the youngest of three siblings who spend what passes for their childhood navigating the twin challenges of an absent father and an alcoholic mother. They move from the relative comfort of a shared council flat to the barren horrors of Pithead. Shuggie’s eldest sister escapes as quickly into the twin escapes of marriage across across the religious divide and emigration. His brother retreats — physically and emotionally — into his art as he sketches the wasteland he finds himself whilst he dreams of taking up his place at the impossibly distant Glasgow School of Art.

That leaves just Shuggie. He is prenaturally eloquent, educated and, most alarmingly, resposible for his wayward mother. Shuggie bears more than a passing resemblance to another eponymous hero — Demon in Barbara Kingsolver’s masterful Demon Copperhead. Both are too young to have any perspective on the true horror of the world in which they find themselves. Both are fiercely, perhaps dangerously, protective of their damaged mothers. Both manage to capture a sense of the hope and optimist that persists despite where they find themselves. But there are stark differences.

As I’ve written about before, Demon’s resilence manifest as an irrepressible energy. He fights, sometimes literally, the injustices that beset him and his family. He rages and often wins. Kingsolver’s genius is to make her read buy in to his irrepressibility. Shuggie is quieter. He’s no less determined to set things right but he does it through everyday acts of defiance. He refuses to be belitted by the impoverishment and daily indiginities of his surroundings. He steps into adult spaces to protect the adult in his life who needs him. I spent the novel moved by his unwitting bravery and heartbroken by his suffering. Demon feels like he can do anything and just needs the world to get out of his way. Shuggie feels like his bravery should be rewarded with a comfortable sleep in bed that his mother can’t accidentally set fire to.

The real animus of this novel is addiction. Addiction as both cause and effect of the issues Shuggie and his family — and his wider community — are forced to confront. Addiction is a major theme in Demon Copperhead too. For Kingsolver, the deliberately manufactured opiod crisis is a very present, deeply threatening backnote. In Shuggie Bain it is addiction is more domestic and harder to ignore. Shuggie’s mother alcoholism is always there — dictating his every move and threatening at all points to overwhelm them both. Sometimes Shuggie is winning but almost always he is not. Even in the happier moments, when Shuggie and by extension the reader, dares to dream of a future that is more hopefully, the dangerous lure of the hidden cans of lager is always there. The fall, when it inevitably comes, is exactly as awful as you’ve been fearing.

I couldn’t honestly say enjoyed this novel because it’s not fun. It’s not suppossed to be. But I was deeply impressed by it. Impressed in the dual sense of it’s impressiveness as a piece of writing craft and the impression it left on me long after I finished reading it. There are numerous scenes and snippets from the book the book I’ve found it to hard forget. I didn’t spend any time in Glasgow or Pithead in the late 80s or early 90s and for that I think that’s something to be grateful for. But the power of Stuart’s extraordinarily accomplished first novel to leave his reader feeling like it’s a time and place that is burned into their memory.

Next: You Are Here by David Nicholls