Shuggie Bain

“The day was flat.” That’s the first sentence of Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, the novel that beat Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light for the 2020 Man Booker prize. I don’t judge books by the prizes they win, but that’s a big prize, and a formidable opponent, and a very well-deserved win, because Shuggie Bain is pretty extraordinary. 

“The day was flat,” Stuart writes, and a minute later, you are immersed in the cold stony gray poverty of a Glasgow boarding house occupied by destitute, alcoholic Scottish men; and one abandoned teenage boy, Hugh “Shuggie” Bain. How did a 15-year-old boy end up alone in a boarding house? Where is his family? Where are the authorities? You’ll find out, because the boarding house and Shuggie’s teenage life are just the bookends, so to speak; the beginning and end of the story. The middle chapters that form most of the novel are about his childhood and his family, such as it is. But for those first few pages, you feel the sadness and discomfort of the boarding house. You smell the dirty shared bathroom and you imagine the damp, mildewy bedding and and the cold water pouring out of the taps and the thin walls and the scarcity--of light, food, warmth, and especially love. And you feel the Dickensian loneliness of this friendless boy. 

Shuggie Bain is a very physical novel, very tactile and sensory. The darkness and menace of the cold Glasgow inner-city streets, and the bleak ugliness of the poverty-stricken Pit feel real. Dirt and cleanliness, hunger and thirst and eating and drinking, cold and warmth, pit-of-the-stomach fear and anxiety, humiliation and pain, are all palpable and immediate. A girl is chased and nearly gang-raped by a group of teenage hooligans, and your heart pounds with terror as she barely escapes. A woman sits in a hot bath, trying to wash away the physical and emotional pain of a rape that she just suffered, but barely remembers because she was drunk; and you can feel the bruises on her inner thighs and the pounding in her head. You can feel her shiver as the bath water goes cold. 

In fairness, the pleasures and comforts of Shuggie Bain are just as vivid, even though they’re few and far between. A taxi driver steps out of the stony darkness of a Glasgow street on a winter night, and enters the bright friendly warmth of the local chippy, and you can smell the food frying, and you can taste the vinegar and salt on the golden fried chips. A little boy, accustomed to neglect and chaos, comes home from school to find that his mother is sober and that she’s cleaned the house and made a meal for him, and he basks in the glow of the lamplight and the television set, luxuriating in the comfort and cheer of the kind of home life that he has only imagined until then.  

*****

Here are a few other things to know before you begin reading Shuggie Bain. It’s a page-turner, compelling enough that you can’t wait to put aside your work or your household duties or your blogging about nothing so that you can get back to reading; but it’s not fun to read at all, because it’s such a sad story. So don’t start reading it unless you have a little bit of free time; and don’t read it if you’re depressed and in need of cheering up, because this book will probably not do that for you. Although it might. No spoilers. 

Secondly, have a phone or other internet-connected Googling device nearby, because unless you grew up in Glasgow, you will run across a whole bunch of words that you won’t understand. I read Shuggie Bain just after I read Uncanny Valley, another book that drove me to Google more than once. Thanks to Muriel Spark, I already knew that in Scotland, “getting the messages” means “going shopping,” but “scunnered” and “boak” and “dreich” were beyond me. Shuggie Bain should actually come with a glossary. That’s a suggestion for future editions. Anyway, this book taught me quite a bit of Glaswegian Scots argot. Maybe I’ll go to Glasgow and try it out. 

Finally, rape and sexual assault are ever-present threats in Shuggie Bain, and that’s not for shock value. The working class Glasgow that Stuart writes about is a harsh and unforgiving place. Sexual violence is always prevalent in places where the strong run rampant and the weak have little protection and little recourse. This is true always and everywhere, sadly, and so it’s an unavoidably true part of the story that Stuart is telling. But if you are easily upset by sexual violence or the imminent threat of it in fiction, then you might want to think twice before you read Shuggie Bain. 

*****

So I promised no spoilers, and this isn’t really a spoiler. But in case I scared you away, you should know that although it’s a painful and sad story, Shuggie Bain ends on a hopeful note. Shuggie makes a friend and he learns how to survive; how to navigate through the world. We don’t get to see him as an adult but I closed the book thinking that if Shuggie were real, he’d probably be OK. He’d probably end up having a pretty good life. I hope so.