84. Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart
Definitely going on the bold list!
We first meet Shuggie aged 16, living alone in a Glasgow bedsit. He was lucky to find it,
..none of the other landlords had wanted to rent to a fifteen-year-old boy who was pretentdng to be one day past his sixteenth birthday.
Shuggie is attending school sporadically, working in a supermarket where the manager doesn't ask many questions. His room is neat. He is frightened and cold.
He sank his face and head into the rare warmth, held himself there and dreamt about filling a bath up to the very top. He thought about lying under the hot water far away from the smells of the other lodgers. It had been a long time since he felt thawed all the way through, all of him warm at the exact same time.
Who is this boy and how did he get to where he is? To tell us this story, Douglas Stuart loops back to 1980s Glasgow, to a city stripped of its industry, where men are out of work, where women jiggle loose coins back out of the electricity meter to pay for the kids' food, where alcoholism, sectarianism and violence are rife.
Shuggie's mother Agnes is an alcoholic, and the story is about her as much as it is about the boy. Beautiful, lonely, an incorrigible romantic (or, to think of it another way, a head-in-the-clouds fantasist), she has left her reliable first husband to shack up with Shuggie's father, Big Shug - a man who is weak, cruel and persistently unfaithful. He moves Agnes and her family out to a lonely and run-down housing estate on the edge of the city, then leaves them there to move in with another woman.
She had loved him and he had needed to break her completely to leave her for good. Agnes Bain was too rare a thing to let someone else love. It wouldn't do to leave pieces of her for another man to collect and repair later.
There's no doubt that this is a bleak and heart-breaking book. Trapped doubly by poverty and by Agnes' alcoholism, the family are stuck - there's a claustrophobia here which reminds me of Milkman but also The Street, Ann Petrie's book about a mother trying to escape poverty and social injustice in 1940s Harlem.
So, it's 400 pages long and miserable. I know what you're thinking. But I would truly recommend this book (unless you're feeling particularly delicate) and, while I don't think its perfect, I can see why it won the Booker. For a start, it's funny - maybe not laugh-out-loud funny, but full of humour and vigour and spirited insults being flung around. Secondly, there's Agnes, who is terrible, and pathetic, but also magnificent. The reader sees her through the loving eyes of her son (it's worth noting that the book is semi-autobiographical) and we root for her when, after hitting rock bottom, she pulls herself together, puts on her lipstick and goes out to fight again. We cheer when she has the last word against the gossiping neighbourhood women or the smug, contemptuous Big Shug.
And finally, as the last point attests, there is real warmth in this book - it manages to be beautiful and life-affirming as well as depressing and bleak. There is love and tenderness, and somehow that shines out more brightly because of the darkness of its background. This quote from the NYT says it better than I could:
He [Stuart] shows us lots of monstrous behavior, but not a single monster — only damage. If he has a sharp eye for brokenness, he is even keener on the inextinguishable flicker of love that remains. The book is long, more than 400 pages, but its length seems crucial to its overall effect. Like Agnes, we’re all doomed to our patterns. How often we repeat the same disastrous mistakes, make the same wrong turn again and again. And yet, like Shuggie, how often we rise, against all odds, to stumble forward once more.