To the Bitter End: Shuggie Bain

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

Picador

Pp. 430

This beautiful and bleak Booker Prize winner (2020) is a story narrated by a boy about his mother and how she was destroyed by his father. The acknowledgement states, “Above all, I owe everything to the memories of my mother and her struggle.” The struggle of the mother in this novel, Agnes, is with her desperate need for love, her spiral into drink and depression, and her humiliation and denial of her situation. The writing is as sharp as a scalpel, slicing through the pretensions of society to the ugly truth beneath, with a Celtic use of expression that means a person doesn’t blush or turn red; she ‘crimsoned’.

Agnes had talent and promise, and her downfall was loving a man who didn’t deserve it and wasn’t special. Big Shug is a taxi driver and thinks of himself as a ladies’ man. “She had loved him, and he 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.” Perceptions come from multiple angles and all of them carry bitterness and resentment at unfulfilled dreams.

 

“To be thirty-nine and have her husband and her three children, two of them nearly grown, all crammed together in her mammy’s flat, gave her a feeling of failure. Him, her man, who when he shared her bed now seemed to lie on the very edge, made her feel angry with the littered promises of better things. Agnes wanted to put her foot through it all, or to scrape it back like it was spoilt wallpaper.”

 

The setting is the suburbs of Glasgow, where different worlds co-exist, and each pretends not to notice the other. “It was true that the ring of green around Glasgow held the new slums of the urban resettlement, these forgotten, remote housing schemes. It seemed cruel to Agnes that these green fields also held some of the fanciest hotels and private clubs she had ever seen. The two different worlds didn’t like to look on each other.” Promise is never realised and disappointment is always imminent. “These low houses looked like ants gathered around trees, or scraps made of the council breeze blocks left over from the high rises. What was once built to be new and healthful now looked sick with a poverty of hope. There was no grass and no greenery; every flat surface was concreted over or covered in large, smooth round boulders.”

 

It is grim and poor as people struggle to maintain their dignity in a pathetic fallacy. “Rain was the natural state of Glasgow. It kept the grass green and the people pale and bronchial.” Nothing good is without unpleasant consequences; even a break in the weather is not wholeheartedly celebrated. “That summer had been unusually hot, with a series of long, dry days all strung together and a clear sun that rewarded enthusiasm with the threat of heatstroke and blisters.” Some moments are almost comically dull and tragic, and the black comedy is evident.

 

“Agnes was worried about her whites. All that summer the news was about Chernobyl and the nuclear explosion that had happened there. It had been a sad but distant worry until a man on the news warned about a light nuclear rain that was falling over the west of Scotland as it headed on to Ireland. As Shuggie helped her bring in the washing from the back line she asked him whether nuclear fallout might actually help get out stubborn stains. The boy shook his head; no, it wouldn’t be like a bleach.”

 

At times it reads like a play script, and I’m reminded of Road by Jim Cartwright or Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth. Scenes are set with precision and echoes of failure and disillusionment abound. Christmas and Hogmanay are special events that are heartbreaking because Shuggie will not enjoy them with childhood innocence and wonder. “He took out the little red football book that Eugene had given him and began to memorize all the teams and results of every match of the previous year. He was penitent with these Hail Marys, going over and over the meaningless scores until he had committed them to memory. It would be a new year, a new chance.” He witnesses the world around him, full of the ghosts of previous prosperity.

 

“The miner’s tackety boots made sparks on the tarmac. The men slowly started drifting one by one along the empty road. There was no colliery whistle now; still the men were pushed along by the muscle memory of a dead routine, heading home at finishing time with nothing being finished, only a belly full of ale and a back cowed with worry. Their donkey jackets were clean and their boots were still shiny as they jerked along the road. Shuggie stepped back as they passed, their heads lowered like those of tired black mules. Without a word, each man collected a handful of thin children, who followed obediently, like reverential shadows.”

 

There is no romance or softness; merely a sense of desperation. At a girls’ night in, women get boisterous and buy underwear. Even their temporary release is laced with a prudish sense of disapproval – as if they were forced to confront their drunken actions when sober in the morning. “It was a certainty that the poor skinny husbands they kept at home would be suffocated later than night. The women, smelling of vinegar and stout, would go home and climb on top of them. Giggling and sweating, yet feeling for a moment like fifteen-year-olds again in their new bras.” This might sound like harmless fun if not for the sardonic follow-up. “They would strip to holey tights and unclasp their swinging tits. It would be drunk open mouths, hot red tongues, and heavy clumsy flesh. Pure Friday-night happiness.”

 

Mostly, it is the women that provide support and advice, even as they are ostensibly competing for male attention. It is the women of the estate who explain to Agnes that she will have to live on disability benefits rather than the dole. “They’ll take one look at yer address and give it to you easy. Look at this place… It’s no like there are any new jobs coming here. Disability is the only club we’ve got, and Monday is club day.” The men are much less sympathetic.

 

“Grey men stood around the mouth of the Miners Club, drinking their lager in the weak sun. Even though the weather was muggy and close, they all wore the thick black donkey jackets they had worn under the ground. As she passed, they turned in to one another like shy penguins, talking in hushed tones. She heard her name whispered, heard her legends discussed. The bolder of the men watched her with hungry eyes over their pints of amber. She knew they only wanted to degrade her, bring her to a new low. She knew a handful of them who had taken her comforts in exchange for a bag of carry-out. When they were done, they all went home again to their scrawny wives and their mismatched bedding. It was all too small, too pitiful to care about any more.”

 

When she enters a high noon shoot out with fake guns in a desperate attempt to regain her dignity and sobriety, Agnes assumes the stage name, Phoenix Rising, which symbolises her unfounded optimism that she can control her addiction. Men try to get Agnes to have a drink when she is trying to stay sober. When she asks why, she is told, “Because it’s what normal people do. Look, just have a sip. To be social like. Ye’ll be fine… You’re a different woman now.” Is it because they don’t understand alcoholism or because they enjoy the feeling of control over her? Her optimism is partly shared by her son, who tries to believe she is not an alcoholic. “Shuggie always rooted for it [sobriety]. But the drink rarely lost. It was like a bully who gave Agnes that running start in the grinning confidence he would catch her easily, and she’d be battered again when they benefit book was cashed again the following Monday. Still, Shuggie always fell for it.”

 

Tragically, they have to face facts and terminate their relationship with its toxic repercussions. After a brief, disastrous visit from his father, Big Shug, Shuggie returns to the house and his mother. “He went inside and found her there, sat on the edge of his single bed. The covers were rumpled beside her, and at her feet sat a bag full of Special Brew. They looked at each other with the same dazed look, like they had both woken up from the same peaceful nap, like it would be a while before they felt like they had the will to form words and speak.” When Shuggie leaves, Agnes watches him go. “She nodded smugly that she had been right, they she had always known he would leave her, like they all did. She watched him climb into the waiting taxi, and she knew then that she had lost him.”

One of the ‘aunties’ says to Shuggie, while reflecting on his mother, “Ah think the more ye love someone the more they take the piss out of that. They will do less and less of what ye want and more and more of just as they fuckin’ please.” This is, however, their attitude towards men and all relationships. It is enormously depressing and pessimistic, and yet there is a glimmer of something that makes me determined to read the sequel. I can’t help but hope for a brighter future for both Shuggie and Agnes.