I’ve just finished Douglas Stuart’s fabulous novel, Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize.
It’s the story of a deeply unhappy woman and her son Shuggie, set in desperately poor housing in suburban Glasgow, over the years 1982 – 1992. Poverty and unemployment, social isolation and unfulfilled dreams all contribute to a life of embitterment and alcoholic stupor for Agnes, while her son tries to maintain the home and lives with the dream of sometime healing his mum.
Shuggie is considered ‘not quite right’ by neighbours, for his devotion to his mother. She is exploited and abused by so many men.
What possibility is there for this loving, devoted and sensitive young man?
Will Agnes ever find the respect she believes she deserves but can never allow herself?
This is a deeply tragic novel, well deserving of that genre of literature: filled with pathos and insight into the human condition. At one critical moment, something of a pivot around which the drama moves towards its ‘resolution’, Shuggies observes the awful reality of his situation.
She hadn’t been the same since New Year’s Eve. Whoever had left her half-naked under a pile of strangers’ coats had taken the yearning for a good party out of her. Now when Shuggie watched her drink he could see that she had lost the taste for a good time. She was drinking to forget herself, because she didn’t know how else to keep out the pain and the loneliness. (323-324).
Perhaps it had been so for a long time, but now they both know it.
Stuart shows a deep insight into the dreams by which people live, clinging to them even when the world around them is falling apart. Agnes dresses up in the hope of achieving some dignity, some respect. Shuggie is both naïve and compassionate, exploited and yet resolute in his loyalty and hope. Together they are the human family—hopeful and hopeless, surrounded by jealous accusers and selfish men, and family who cannot take it any more, and must move away. In the background a society that provides, but without feeling. It’s a post-industrial nightmare.
This is a wonderful book, despite its gruesome setting and story. It is a book ideal for reading during the season of Lent, but also one entirely apt for us as we live within this pandemic and wonder what will emerge from the ruins of a society built upon dreams so easily swept away.
Here is the raw reality of human life, love and loss, and with it the invitation to consider how we might live differently, how we might affirm our essential worth and that of each other, not through appearance, performance or pretence, but simply through being.
Our political leaders were wont to say, early in this new reality of Covid, ‘We’re all in this together.’ They did not mean it, unfortunately.
Nevertheless what they said is true. If only we could live with the hope of each other’s redemption, as Shuggie does—all of us, in this together.