Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, deserves all its accolades. To successfully distill real life into fiction is something only highly gifted novelists can achieve, and that this was written by a debutant, is eye opening. It is one of those novels which is very much place-located, which beautifully takes its identity from its geography. The raw grittiness of 1980s Glasgow – and indeed, the pre-industrial north of the UK – rings through resonantly, depicting that particular texture of poverty unique to the north and to this period.
As many reviews will have highlighted and rightly celebrated, the language and accent and cadences, particularly of speech and dialogue, is what lends such authenticity and immediacy to this novel. Women call each other ‘hen’ or ‘lassie’ and there are slang words like ‘boak’ (vomit), ‘stour’ (dust), ‘message’ (shopping/housekeeping), ‘wean’ (child), ‘tick’ (credit), ‘smirr’ (drizzle/rain). There is the wonderful way Stuart spells the Glaswegian pronunciations which give the speeches so much character and flavour: anymair’ (anymore), ‘aw’ (all), ‘gies’ (give) ‘cannae’ (can’t), ‘frae’ (from), ‘’haud on’ (hold on), ‘goat’ (got). The evocative rendering of Glaswegian speech can almost be heard coming clear off the text/page, which in turn informs and colours, but is separate from the writing voice. Stuart’s writing voice is so distinctive that even when I am not reading the book – in the periods when I am doing other things before being able to resume reading – I still hear his writing voice in my head. When I am reading other things, I also hear his voice on top of those other texts. This is real testimony to the power of his writing; only the best writers have that lingering effect.
It is of course the characters which both drive the storyline as well as locate the novel. The Bains, Agnes and Shuggie, her son (eight years old when they all move to the Pithead and then are promptly abandoned by Shuggie’s father, (Big) Shug), typify the dysfunctional family, broken, headed by a single mother; the mother a chronic alcoholic as her way of coping with a hard life and many regrets and disappointments, the children either escaping home as soon as they can through work or marriage (Catherine, Agnes’ daughter of a previous marriage, flees to South Africa), and if they cannot, they end up feeling trapped, like Leek (Agnes’ son from that previous marriage), and who finds other ways of escaping, like self-effacement, withdrawal, sleeping, absenteeism while present. Shuggie is unusual in that he stays, and hovers, and tries to save his mother from herself, but pays a high personal price even as a child, tiptoeing around his mother’s oscillating periods of drunkenness and sobriety. Stuart describes in heartbreakingly authentic detail the experience of a child living with an alcoholic parent, even apart from neglect and other abuses: Shuggie would get stomach cramps at quarter past three every afternoon at school, which he
came to know it was only indigestion. It was the burning bile of anticipation, the rising fear of what might lie at home.
Agnes had gotten sober many times before, but the cramps had never really, completely gone away. To Shuggie, the stretches of sobriety were fleeting and unpredictable and not to be fully enjoyed. As with any good weather, there was always more rain on the other side. He’s stopped counting a while ago. To have marked her sobriety in days was like watching a happy weekend bleed by: when you watched it, it was always too short. So he just stopped counting”
p219
This novel is a marvellous study of the wreckage of humans and homes that drink can achieve.
The neighbours in Pithead are of a community who are used to being in poverty and want, and as such, respectability becomes an alternative currency. They prey on the weakest amongst themselves, but mainly because they are so themselves downtrodden and seeking whatever slivers of pleasure and release they can grab at. Men are abusive, physically and sexually, but women are abusive too, Stuart shows us, emotionally and physically. But in all this grime and grit – socially as well as literally, with the coal heaps discolouring the entire landscape and rendering everything monochrome in coal dust – people eke out a living, love their children, dance, pray, party, have moments of generosity and tenderness, even while living in want, squalor, fighting, cheating, taking drugs and drink to soften the edges of harsh realities and the unrelenting trap of poverty. It is, however, not a community that will take handouts or charity and would not want a readership to patronise it with such, let alone with pity.
The pacing of the novel is done with surprising deftness and lightness of touch, and is the defining characteristic of Shuggie Bain. It is also the reason that the reader does not become mired in the misery depicted in the novel, because it moves so swiftly and unself-pityingly. The sordid, the desperate, the deprived, are all laid bare with unflinching honesty and matter-of-factness, then moved on from without any wallowing; this is not misery lit. This is not poverty porn or voyeuristic dwelling on the grotesque and pitiable. Neither is it one of those novels which seem to try to rub the reader’s nose in the worst of it. The pacing is everything; it is a pacing which would do credit to the most experienced and practised of novelists and editors; there is time to appreciate the fine details of the landscape, but not get lost nor yet bogged down in it. It is attentive to details, and the details are quite brilliant in their narrative, portraiture, and evocative powers, but the novel never overwhelms with detail. As such, it is a remarkably easy read, for such heavy subject matter. It is even, for a novel set into such a grim landscape of hardship and want, a remarkably uplifting read because of the moments of tenderness and kindness, as occasional and heart-lifting as the slivers of sunshine that break through the Glaswegian rainclouds.
There are a few themes which could be drawn out a little more perhaps, such as the rivalry between Protestants and Catholics, which pops up in many places, but is not quite explained, and leaves the reader wondering if there is a big difference between the Glaswegian Protestant-Catholic divide and the Irish one. But this is a tiny issue, and there are some massive aspects to praise, not least the extremely evocative and detailed rendering of the materiality of the place and period, such as the architecture, the construction materials, the electric meters, the types of food people of that community ate, the clothing and textures, etc- all those were just brilliantly depicted and captured and conveyed the atmosphere and experience faithfully and vividly.
Stuart’s novel is a huge accomplishment, rendering that delicate balance of social realism writing which at its best makes fiction even more vivid than realism, art more vivid than life. It is not one of those novels which are so clever they are almost hold the reader off; quite on the contrary, it is a storyteller’s delight, one of those novels you want to rush back to, one of those unput-downable reads. Profound, intense, heartfelt, Shuggie Bain is all that, yes, and yet, all delivered with such a sure, light touch, pitch perfect in fact; immediacy coupled with terrifying veracity – this is just not a book to be missed.
Lovely review. It’s a multilayered book and you captured so many of the layers!
It was a heartrending book to read. The mother helpless in her own alcoholic stupor, the kid who stays with her even when he had an alternative with his (granted, detached and distant) father. And the way he learned to read her ‘signals’ and deduce her state, at an age when all he should have been deducing was whether his buddies could come out to play.
It was remarkably detailed and yet moved on quite briskly. You’re right, the pacing was excellent.
It reminded me of Angela’s Ashes, another book that had me in tears, although there was a black humour as well.
Contrasting this with Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance’s book about growing up in poverty with a drug-addicted mother in Ohio. I noticed that in Hillbilly, Vance’s mother, grandmother and sister are all, to one extent or another, trapped by pregnancy and children while Vance is able to ‘escape’ to college and a better life. In Shuggie, though, there isn’t the same gender divide: his sister and brother both leave, and he stays on to the end. (Hillbilly is a different sort of book with lots of social commentary of dubious quality — it’s interesting and spurs argument, but the writing is nowhere near as good as Shuggie Bain or Angela’s Ashes)