This is by Douglas Stuart. It was published in 2020, and won the Booker Prize that same year. And it's a debut novel. Wow...

I started reading it on the plane from Singapore.

The first chapter, set in Glasgow's South Side in 1992, introduces us to 16-year-old Shuggie. He has a dull job, still attends school when he can, rents a room in a very basic boarding-house (let out by people who don't ask too many questions), has slightly strange fixations with porcelain figurines and ancient football scores, and seems to be a bit of a magnet for the lonely Mr Darling. In the eyes of the women he works with, "Something about the boy was no right."

It all seems rather bleak. Actually, it's a somewhat hopeful scene, as we find out later. But fresh in, I found it bleak.


Very different from our own Glasgow experience in 2019

Then we shift to Sighthill, another area of Glasgow, and back 11 years to 1981. Shuggie's "mammy" is Agnes, proud, fastidious, and beautiful. Along with her three children (two by a previous marriage), and her feckless husband, Big Shug, she lives with Lizzie and Wullie, her parents. We meet her staring out of the window: "Everything in the room behind her felt so small, so low-ceilinged and stifling, payday to Mass day, a life bought on tick, with nothing that ever felt owned outright."

It's an era when the iron industry has gone, and the shipbuilding industry has gone, and the mines are about to go. The women who visit Lizzie all have unemployed men at home, "rotting into the settee for want of decent work". It's a grim, gritty life that's unfolding in front of us. Narrow, devoid of opportunities, where any available pleasures are seized and made the most of.

Big Shug has a job as a taxi-driver, a calling that facilitates his vast appetite for extramarital affairs. He seems to exert some strange power over women. Agnes left her first husband for him, although we see very early on (in the nauseating description of a trip to Blackpool) that he's violent, horribly violent, towards his wife. I'd just finished The Country of Others -- literally just finished it at Singapore airport -- and I couldn't help being a little disheartened by the immediate recurrence of the theme of domestic abuse.

All of which added up, about a tenth of the way into the novel, to the feeling that I might be reading the wrong book.

But if you feel the same, persist, persist. Because this is an incredibly moving novel.



Big Shug is a truly appalling figure, with no redeeming features. He's a creature of darkness, at home in the nocturnal underbelly of the city. He's a Protestant. Not a good advert for a Protestant, but these labels matter, I learned, in Glasgow. He grew up watching his father beating his mother, so I guess he didn't have much in the way of positive role models.

He can't cope with his wife's drinking, which is understandable (setting the bedroom on fire at her parents' place was the last straw), but it never occurs to him to ask why she is drinking, and what role he might have played in her addiction.

After the fire, several things happen. Agnes's father "disciplines" her with his belt. She is 39. He has no idea why she is unhappy, blames himself for having been too soft on her, and prays as he belts. And Big Shug, having rustled up a flat, via some dubious contact, decides that the family is moving.

The new place is in "Pithead", a horrible area: "In the distance lay a sea of huge black mounds, hills that looked as if they had been burnt free of all life. They filled the line of the horizon, and beyond them was nothing, like it was the very edge of the earth... [The houses] were the plainest, unhappiest-looking homes Agnes had ever seen..." The neighbours are frankly malevolent. They've not had much of a life either, and now the mine has gone, the women are left trying to hold the whole thing together. They resent Agnes for looking so well turned out -- one of the things she is a stickler for -- and accuse her of putting on airs. They rapidly figure out her "wee problem", though, and are very happy to help it along.

And this God-forsaken locality is where Big Shug leaves them: "I can't stay any more. I can't stay with you. All your wanting. All that drinking." He moves in with Joanie, the dispatcher from the taxi company... And Agnes? Well, "she was to stay where she was dropped. She was to take any little kindness he would give." When she finds out about Joanie, she asks him point blank why he brought them all to Pithead. He replies:

"'I had to see.'
"'Had to see WHAT?' she asked, her voice cracking in anger. 'I thought this was what YOU wanted.'
"'I had to see if you would actually come.'...
"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."



Shuggie, meanwhile, in addition to his problematic family life, is bullied -- and sexually abused in various unspecified ways -- because he's different. He talks nicely; he tries to take care of his appearance; he has always had a preference for things that are gender-stereotyped as feminine. He doesn't really understand his identity, and longs to be "normal".

Agnes's drinking habit quickly chews through the benefits the family receive. She supplements her income by pawning whatever's around, and by doing a bit of casual sex work. At one point, Shuggie tells someone: "My mother has never worked a day in her life. She's far too good-looking for that." (And indeed, we find out later that both her husbands insisted on her not working, so she has little to offer the job market.)

Of course, all this takes a heavy toll on the children. The daughter, Catherine, is the first to escape, marrying young, and following her husband to South Africa. Which leaves the boys, Leek and Shuggie, to mop up the aftermath of Agnes's sprees, hide anything she might use to kill herself with, and try to organize the benefit money so that there's at least something left to spend on food. Watching Dallas and its alcoholic character, Sue Ellen, Shuggie is unimpressed: "The whole thing was a pile of lies. Where was the head in the oven and the house full of gas? Where were the tears and the half-dressed uncles and the sister who would never come home?"

Eventually, Agnes joins AA, is sober for a year, gets a job in a petrol station, and meets Eugene. It is during this year that we see Agnes at her sparkling best. At one point, she tries to encourage Shuggie, when the neighbourhood kids see him dancing, and delight in mocking him. She tells him to pay no attention: "Just hold your head up high and GIE. IT. LALDY." He reflects: "She was no use at maths homework, and some days you could starve rather than get a hot meal from her, but Shuggie looked at her now and understood this was where she excelled. Every day with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world. When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise." And this indeed is Agnes. Even during the periods she's in thrall to alcohol, she retains her pride (at least when she's conscious). Her house is spick and span, and she despises the slatternly women around her with their baggy leggings and stained T-shirts.



All goes well for the new Agnes until Eugene attends her one-year-sober party, and meets some of her AA friends. He seems like a nice, genuine guy. But he obviously knows nothing at all about alcoholism. He is thoroughly spooked by the ghostly, sucked-dry aura of the recovering alcoholics. So he takes Agnes to a posh place, and he goads her to drink. He needs to prove to himself that she's not "pitiful" like the AA people. He needs to know when she'll "get better": "Look, ah'm no trying to get ye drunk. Ah'm trying to have ye try a DRINK... Because it's what normal people do."

She succumbs -- and, predictably, she's soon back to Square 1, and Shuggie is back to nursemaid duties. Eugene at least has the grace to feel guilty, and tries to help the family out in various ways. But he still has no comprehension of the illness that is alcoholism: "You know mibbe don't take a wee drink the day," he suggests. "How about if ye feel it coming on, ye could go for a wee walk or something?"

Agnes increasingly encounters violence on her one-night stands, and is increasingly drinking to forget herself. She loses her job, and relies more and more on Shuggie, who is now attending school very erratically.

She attempts suicide, and ends up in psychiatric hospital, at which point Shuggie is taken to his father's. Agnes eventually discharges herself, and there's a magnificent scene where she arrives at her husband's girlfriend's house to reclaim her boy. When Big Shug won't answer the door, she hurls a bin through the front-room window, and lobs a shoe at Joanie. By this time, she's surrounded by a crowd of youths egging her on, holding out stones to "this warrior woman". There's a psychological tug of war over Shuggie. His father tells him: "She's no gonnae get any better, son. Come away from there." Shuggie can only reply: "But she might."

Agnes starts looking for a house exchange, as a way of making a new beginning. She hopes Eugene will move in with her. But he dashes that hope completely: "'I don't like ye when ye've got a drink in ye,' was how he told her they were finally done." Of course, you want to sock Eugene, given that he was the one who wrecked her chances. But he acted out of ignorance, not malice.

From there, Agnes's problem augments exponentially. She has an argument with Leek, and throws him out, leaving Shuggie as her only carer.



Mother and son move further into the city, and the boy longs for this fresh start to make both of them brand new and normal... It's not long, however, before he's being goaded by his new school-mates. And it's not long before there's another suicide attempt from Agnes.

In the end, she doesn't die at her own hand, or not directly at least. She dies simply of the effects of drunkenness. She is brought home by the police after another bender and a night in the cells. When Shuggie returns, she is in a bad way. He helps her, doing all the horrible tasks like clearing her mouth of mucus, and undressing her, just as he has done so many times. And then, as she gags again, he doesn't help her...

We close back in 1992, and with hindsight, that opening chapter doesn't look quite so negative. Shuggie has a place to live. He has a job. He is still getting a bit of education. He doesn't have an alcoholic to soak up his time and emotions like a blotter. He still has some faint hope of advancement (hope lost to Leek, it seems, who now has a partner and child to look after, and appears to have given up on his dreams of becoming an artist). And Shuggie has a friend, Leanne (who's also confused about her sexuality, and also has a drunken mother). But he has regrets. Leek realizes something is weighing on his brother's mind: "Shuggie tried, he wanted to tell Leek what had happened, but the words wouldn't come, he couldn't admit it. All he would say was that he had been tired, that he wished he had tried harder."

In the final scenes, we see Shuggie meeting up with Leanne, who is still making a valiant effort to keep an eye on Moira, her mother (now definitively on the streets), by bringing her food and clean clothes. Both Shuggie and Leanne know how hopeless this is, and how things are going to end for the aging, alcohol-dependent woman.

I wondered about that scene. Wondered whether it was just too lurid. But is the goal to show Shuggie that his feelings of guilt are misplaced? If he'd saved his own mother back then -- as he'd saved her so many times before -- would she in any case sooner or later have ended up in the same desperate position as auld Moira?



The novel's dedication reads: "For My Mother, A.E.D." And the acknowledgements begin like this: "Above all, I owe everything to the memories of my mother and her struggle, and to my brother who gave me everything he could."

Stuart insists the novel isn't autobiographical, but it was certainly inspired by his own childhood in Glasgow, where he was brought up by an alcoholic mother. Addiction marred his entire childhood, he says.

Once I'd accustomed myself to it, I found Shuggie Bain a riveting read. Stuart really does engage your sympathies, and you find yourself rooting for Agnes and her sons, even while you're aware there can be no happy ending to this kind of story. The book is admirable for its depiction of the lives of those well and truly left behind by the catastrophic economic policies of the 1980s and 1990s, the trials of the gay kid in a viciously homophobic environment, and -- most of all -- the heartbreak of being an alcoholic, or part of the family of an alcoholic.

Misgivings? Well, a review by Sarah Moss, in which she expresses her qualms about the depiction of women -- "who are all scrawny or flabby, wearing too much makeup or not enough, and whose clothes are always wrong" -- did resonate with me. But then, Stuart isn't exactly complimentary about the male half of the population either...



Also, you have to ask yourself whether you're indulging in poverty porn here... It's hard not to read this book without succumbing to an almost morbid fascination. You know enough of life to know it's not unrealistic, but to have it laid bare like this, unremittingly, and to be reading it, avidly, feels slightly indecent.

In an interview, Matthew Schneier quotes Stuart as saying: "I admire things that are unflinching... I think that’s the highest accolade." As Schneier puts it, the author is convinced that there is much scope in fiction for a warts-and-all depiction of working-class life: "Fiction can be an overwhelmingly middle-class pursuit for writers and for readers. 'There’s an enormous burden for people who are writing stories not set within the middle class, because on one hand, we don’t want to be seen to be just doing misery porn,' he said. 'On the other hand, we don’t want to be seen as denying the characters the dignity or the truth of what it was really like. There’s a sort of a pressure on working-class stories to not tell the truth with too much reality.' He spoke of a middle-class gaze that believes it is owed a happy ending or, at least, to be let off the hook for its silent complicity."

Eliza Gearty argues: "Stuart's novel is saved from the 'misery-lit' trap it could’ve fallen into by the utter beauty of its writing and the sheer authenticity of its world. Stuart himself grew up in public housing in Glasgow, and he approaches the many social problems his characters encounter with delicacy and compassion."

Don't know. Hard circle to square.

Possibly publishers struggled to square it too. Shuggie Bain had more than 30 rejections before someone finally saw enough merit to run with it. A decision that was richly vindicated, of course, when the Booker judges made their unanimous decision in only an hour...



For me, the analogy made by Stephanie Bunbury is very apt: Stuart has created something akin to "a Breughel painting, stuffed with detail, vitality, humour and people who live at the tops of their voices".

Gearty also makes a good point when she describes the book as "a love letter of sorts to Glasgow". Glasgow is seen very much in the way Agnes is -- with absolute clarity, but also with sympathy, forgiveness, and understanding. It's a portrait that is "both unflinchingly authentic and poignantly tender".

The sign of a good novel, I always feel, is that it makes you ask yourself: "What would I have done?" That is, it makes its situations and characters so vivid that you start to put yourself in their place. What would I have done, if I'd been Agnes or Shuggie? Would I have had as much courage as either of them?