words by @rybazoxo
2020 was a year that none of us will ever forget. After I saw Morrissey in Leeds in March of that year, the world decided to close, and lockdown. We were all then subjected to, and brutalised by, face masks, vaccinations, mass-media hysteria and erm…death. All very grim. What I didn't notice in that year, and I'd be surprised if anybody did, was the 2020 Booker Prize handed to Douglas Stuart for his debut novel, ‘Shuggie Bain’. It wasn’t until late last year that, scouring a charity shop for books, I picked this one up for 50p and thought I'd give it a whirl.
A disclaimer at this point would be that I normally don't read fiction. I'm autistic, so fiction isn't real, and I normally stay clear, preferring biographies, true crime stories and memoirs. However, I read all the praise about this Scottish 1980s set melodrama / coming-of-age drama/alcohol abuse drama and enthusiastically began reading. At over 400 pages, it's not a short one but I thought it was worth it. I mean, a booker prize has got to be good, right? Well, not quite. The first 150 - 200 pages of this book are really good. You route for young Shuggie as he battles with his alcoholic mother (I’ll get back to that shortly), his problematic siblings, his absent father, his blatant homosexuality, and living with his grandparents - all against a backdrop of council estate poverty and Thatcherite policies.
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| 1980s Glasgow. Image by Raymond Depardon |
Where Douglas paints a perfect picture of a grim Scotland (I've never been but read about it) and has strong characterisation, he lacks any fleshing-out of the coming-of-age of the book's main protagonist. This book should be called ‘Agnes Bain’ (Shuggie’s Mum) as she is the main character in this book. Agnes battles booze throughout the novel, and every alcoholism cliche you can think of, including with the wrong men, only to meet her maker at the end, is by and large, rather disappointing. I thought this was going to be some sort of ‘good outweighs the bad’ kind of book - it is not. Shuggie’s character comes good at the beginning and middle but that's it.
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| 1980s Glasgow. Image by Raymond Depardon |
The end of the story has no real conclusion and the last chapter (there are 30 altogether) introduces another character’s alcoholic mother which just regurgitates content. It's a shame as this could have been a good book, and I think 200 pages would have done it and still won the prize. But, rather like COVID-19, this book was very grim, went on for far too long, and I was so glad when it ended.