DOUGLAS STUART Shuggie Bain. Reviewed by Linda Godfrey

Tags: Booker Prize winner/ Douglas Stuart/ Scottish fiction/ Shuggie Bain

Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning debut shows the human cost of elevating the economy over society.

Shuggie Bain is set in post-Thatcher Glasgow among people who are doing it hard. Many who worked in the mines and associated industries have lost their jobs and have little hope of retraining and employment. Most women do not work and depend on welfare payments to support themselves and their families. There is a culture of heavy, sustained drinking and drinking comes first, before secure housing and food for children. The narrative focuses on one family, the Bains. There’s Agnes the mother, Shug the father, and three children: Catherine and Alexander (known as Leek), Agnes’ children from a previous relationship, and Hugh, called Shuggie.

The novel opens with Shuggie when he is 16 years old, living in a boarding house and working in a sandwich shop. We experience his world, the cold, the dullness and flatness of his life. All of Agnes’s children have at one time expressed their desires and ambitions. Only Catherine has escaped Scotland and Agnes, but has only exchanged one hard life for another, her husband now working as a miner in South Africa. Leek makes beautiful hand-crafted furniture and draws well, but works as a labourer. Shuggie wants to be a hairdresser:

He had always loved to brush and play with hair; it was the only thing that made time truly fly. When he had turned sixteen he had promised himself he would go to the hairdressing college that sat south of the River Clyde. He had gathered up all of his inspiration, the sketches he had copied from the Littlewoods catalogue and pages ripped from the Sunday magazines.
 
There are two refrains that run through the first half of the book: ‘he’s no right’ and ‘it’s no right’ that sum up life in this world, and also people’s responses to Shuggie. He is not like them and he doesn’t pretend to be; he’s gay, clean, neat, polishes his shoes, dresses in suits and speaks politely. When we meet him he has cold, damp encounters with another man from the boarding house for money and beers and won’t sleep with the older women he works with at the sandwich shop.

Something about the boy was no right, and this was at least something they could pity.

The one strong, enduring relationship Shuggie has is with his mother, Agnes. She is beautiful, vain, aspirational and an alcoholic. Agnes dominates any environment she inhabits. But she does not use her abilities for ‘good’. Through the eyes of those around her we see her destructive behaviour and its consequences for herself, her relationships with her partners and her children.

As the song changed, Shuggie watched his mother clutch the can to her chest and spin around the room. Agnes screwed her eyes shut and went back to a place where she felt young, and hopeful and wanted. Back to Barrowland where strange men would follow her hungrily across the ballroom and women would drop their eyes in jealousy. With fingers unfurling like a beautiful fan, she ran her hand over her body. Just above her hips, she touched the stubborn roll of fat she had earned birthing her three weans. Suddenly her eyes opened and she returned from the past, feeling rotten and stupid and lumpy.

‘I hate this wallpaper, I hate those curtains and that bed and that fucking lamp.’

Her children are loyal to her, raise themselves and look after little Shuggie.
Shuggie adores her. She is the one person who accepts him as he is and he in turn copies her behaviour. Agnes wears fine clothing, and at various times has a mink coat, a good purple mohair coat, and black high heels; she wears costume rings with big stones. Her house is immaculate and she looks down on the women in the estate, who don’t comb their children’s hair and let them run around in dirty clothes and no shoes, their faces covered in snot. Here’s one woman who lives across the road:

The meat on her face was as taut as a leathered skull. Her eyes were deep pockets in her head, and her hair was a rich wild brown but thinning like the coat of an uncombed cat. She stood in bagged-out stretch pants, the stirrups stuffed into men’s house slippers.

Agnes’s ultimate put-down, as expressed to Shuggie, is that these families don’t have matching sheets on their beds.

Shuggie does attempt to fit in, both at school and on the street, but is still despised and harassed by the neighbourhood who recognise he is ‘no right’:

‘Wid ye get a load o’ that. Liberace is moving in!’ screamed one of the women.

The women and children howled as one, high squeaky laughs and throaty coughs full of catarrh. ‘Oh! I do hope the piano will fit in the parlour.’

The story is told from multiple points of view – mostly Shuggie, Agnes, and Leek, but occasionally other characters have their say, such as Shug and Eugene, two of Agnes’s partners. The book may be called Shuggie Bain, but it is Agnes’s story that dominates – what she does, how she lives, her drinking, wilfulness and pain shaping and destroying everyone who comes in contact with her. Shuggie and Leek love her deeply, and Leek only breaks with her when he can take it no more after a particularly devastating incident and once Shuggie is old enough to look after himself. Shuggie stays with Agnes to the bitter end, but by then she has infected his confidence, the very core of his being, so that he may be incapable of living his own life to the full. When he arrives at the evening college to enrol:

At the bus stop outside the college he alighted with half a dozen eighteen year olds. They wore the newest, most fashionable gear and talked with a buzzing confidence that masked their own nerves. Shuggie walked half as fast as they did. He watched them go in the front door, then he recrossed the street to catch the bus going the other way.

Douglas Stuart has given the world an insight into post-Thatcher Glasgow, told from the point of view not of anthropologists, social workers, politicians or economists but from the point of view of the inhabitants, from the centre of their stony world.

The book is an indictment of neo-liberal policies and laissez-faire economics. I’m thinking of Margaret Thatcher’s chilling comment:

And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.

It is very clear from this book that we do not live in an economy, but a society, and that there is no empathy in considering workers as individual economic units to be used and discarded to fit a political party’s policy. Rather, they are human beings with families who are a part of a nation-wide community. As their labour and spending supports the community, governments have a responsibility towards them when they are vulnerable.

Shuggie Bain is a revealing and enduring monument to the lives of ordinary people, as a class and as individuals. It’s a tale of infinite sadness, of those who were abandoned to live in ‘an economy’. Through the lens of this particular family, the reader sees the struggle in these people’s lives and the loss of their dreams. Even reading the book in summer was chilling, and not only because of Stuart’s descriptions of the Scottish weather and lack of heating.

Douglas Stuart Shuggie Bain Picador 2020 PB 400pp RRP $32.99

Linda Godfrey is a poet, editor and teacher. She lives on Wodi Wodi land, on the south coast of New South Wales.

You can buy Shuggie Bain from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.

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