Shuggie Bain

Shuggie Bain bookends my October this year; I started reading it on October 1st and finished just now, with just a couple of hours left in the month. It was one of the Man Booker winners I still had to read, together with the 2021 winner The Promise, which has lived on my bookshelf for a similar amount of time. But if it is anything like Shuggie Bain, I'm afraid it will have to wait for another couple of months.

Maybe a book about a young boy growing up gay in a poor, grey and always rainy Glasgow isn't the best thing to read during a grim and rainy autumn month. Maybe that was why it took me 31 days to get through. Or maybe it was because the book is so heavy, filled with sadness and broken possibilities, that you cannot consume it in a big gulp. You have to go slow, or it will consume you.

The book stretches over five sections set in specific years between 1981 and 1992. They cover the places Shuggie (real name: Hugh) lives with his mother Agnes and his half-brother and sister. His father leaves the family early on in the novel, dumping them in an outlying scheme and moving in with another woman. After that, he is around at the edge of their existence, coming in to wreck rather than help. The half-sister lives pretty early on too, escaping their meagre existence into marriage. Shuggie and his half-brother Leek (Alexander) are the ones left to take care of their mother, who has never worked a day in her life but values her appearance and what others might think of her immensely. This means her children speak proper English, in contrast to the Scottish accent all the other characters have (I had to read those sentences aloud in my head sometimes, to figure out what they said). It also means they appear to be above the others, who despise them and won't accept them. The other kids wouldn't have accepted Shuggie anyway, as from a very early age it is clear that he is what they call a 'poof'.

But this is not Shuggie's biggest problem; that is his mother's alcoholism. From early on it is clear that there is no saving her; even when she is on a dry spell you can just tell that things will take a turn for the worst again. Unfortunately, Shuggie never realises this. Even when Leek leaves, telling him there is no hope, Shuggie stays at home, neglecting his school work and other things a young kid should be thinking of, to take care of his mother, to try and save some benefit money to buy food, and to keep all the other drunks away. These are heartbreaking passages; Agnes is completely reliant on him sometimes, but wallows in self-pity and does not see the love her children have for her.

Some of these sections are written in short bursts, as if they are a random collection of memories. This made me wonder whether the novel was autobiographical, but the author Douglas Stuart insists it is not, although he does admit some of the scenes were taken from his memories. In a way I am glad, as I would not wish such a childhood upon anyone.

 Now that I have finished it, I can't really make up my mind what I thought about this novel. I can see why it won the Booker, as the writing is very good and the themes feel important, but the message is not a happy one and I lost sympathy for the character of Shuggie along the line. He is not optimistic, he is not purposeful, he just doggedly lives along until the change that comes along is big enought to push him off track. This made me care less about the outcome, which made the final parts of the novel feel somewhat like a chore. But Shuggie Bain is a book I would probably never have picked up if it hadn't won, so there is still something to say for keeping up the Man Booker reading tradition. If only a happy book would win sometimes...