Shuggie Bain
Why I read this book
The book won the Booker Prize in 2020, and these sorts of things are how I populate my reading list.
One key takeaway
Alcoholism is fucking grim.
Summary
The novel recounts Shuggie Bain’s upbringing in dealing with both his mother Agnes’s swirling alcoholism, toxic fatherhood, and his own queerness. The novel is also very much about Glasgow, taking place through a downward escalator of increasingly degraded locations filled with the cast aside and forgotten. The novel begins and ends with Shuggie in the novel’s present, away from his mother’s cyclonic need, but the majority is Shuggie and Agnes, hurtling through life as each family member fights endlessly to leave the orbit of addiction. Sister Catherine escapes to South Africa and is never heard from again, Brother Leek finally gets “papped”, Glaswegian for persona non grata. Agnes abandons first husband then her second abandons her. Grandparents Lizzie and Wullie escape into a synchronized death, and finally Agnes falls off this mortal coil.
How was the book
A novel born of experience: dire, grim, ghastly, and lived. Addiction hollows you like termites, eating at your pulpy soul until the surface is the depth, painted skin thin-stretched over emptiness. In reading, you cheer the underdogs cheer that this is the time that things get better, that the person you have seen glimmers of in winks of sobriety can finally crest the mountaintop of their addiction, can finally be the mother her children so clearly need. But that is not this novel. That is not the addict’s plight. The novel moves with the unrelenting pace of a mudslide, careering from one familial disaster to the next.
Douglas Stuart has crafted a novel filled with the reedy lyricism of Scottish dialect; children are weans (wee-ones elided), vomity boak will fill your throat after a night of drinking. Wino jakeys roam the streets, and you best bring a wee carry-out to drink if you stop in somewhere. The novel is of Scotland, but its themes of abandonment, maternal, economic, paternal, national, are of everywhere. You don’t need to be Scottish to have your country abandon you, your Iron leader leave you behind, your mother to descend further into the throes of alcoholism until she finally declares you “papped”, Glaswegian for persona non grata. Not only in Scotland are there toxically masculine fathers and the dereliction of fatherhood, childhood bullies who single out the boy who is not like other boys. And in spite of that, this is a Scottish novel, another in the litany of Scottish literary tragedies.
I think what remains to be seen is how Stuart takes what is an ear for dialog and feet for pacing and walks the precipitous steps away from the lived into invention, away from autobiography.
Any other reading
Irvine Welsh by Trainspotting, 1993.