Written in the Glaswegian dialect, a realist and grimly authentic portrayal of the effects of alcoholism on a family living on the breadline.
It is an episodic narrative, told in the past tense, framed by a day in the life of Shuggie, a fifteen year old boy living on his own in a bedsit in Glasgow in 1992. It then flashes back to 1981 after which it gives a chronological account of episodes in Shuggie's life. The perspective jumps between the PoV's of Shuggie and other members of his family: his father Shug, his mother Agnes, his sister Catherine and his brother Leek.
Shuggie is the eponymous hero and this is his bildungsroman but in many way the principal character is Agnes; the story chronicles her descent into alcoholism and its consequences. She's a beautiful woman who, when sober, attempts to maintain standards of beauty and good manners but is haunted by missed opportunities and what might have been. Sadness, and anger, leads to her drinking.
Shuggie is an infant at the start of the chronological narrative; his childhood is almost entirely blighted first by his mother's drinking and secondly because he is "no quite right", not a "normal" boy but a "wee poofter". He is bullied unmercifully at school and on the housing estate where he lives.
His older half-brother Leek is another tragic character, a hugely talented artist with an unconditional place at art school which he cannot accept because he can't abandon his alcoholic mother. In his eyes, especially after his older sister has escaped through marriage and emigration, he is the carer, crying after a particularly awful incident: "It's too much, Mammy. I can't be the one to save everybody all the time." (Ch 24) I spent a lot of the time fearing for Leek (because of the frame narrative the reader knows from the start that Shuggie will at least survive the story).
The writing is wonderful. The verisimilitude is such that it is almost memoir: there were echoes of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. The dialect reminds me of the best of Irving Welsh (although his books, such as Ecstasy and Train Spotting are set in Edinburgh rather than Glasgow which anyone but a Sassenach like me can probably distinguish as distinct dialects). Shuggy's bowel problem is like that of Vernon God Little, another Booker Prize winner.
Selected quotes:
- "On particularly low days he folded all types of his bodily discharge into the taramasalata. He sold an uncanny amount of that bourgeois shite." (Ch 1)
- “Pushing the metal through the bumpy pink flesh was the easy part; the difficult part was resisting the urge to do the same to the customers.” (Ch 1)
- “The littered promises of better things.” (Ch 2)
- "A life bought on tick, with nothing that ever felt owned outright." (Ch 2)
- "He was a selfish animal, she knew that now, in a dirty, sexual way that aroused her against her better nature." (Ch 2)
- “Leek was a quiet soul, given to watching from the edges, capable of disappearing even when someone was talking to him.” (Ch 2)
- “Seeing the lights of Glasgow, he relaxed back into the seat, and for the first time that day his shoulders fell from around his ears.” (Ch 3)
- “Rain was the natural state of Glasgow. It kept the grass green and the people pale and bronchial.” (Ch 3)
- "He watched them rub their pink arms in the cold night air and shelf their tits over tight-folded arms." (Ch 3)
- "He was golden, though in reality, he was more of a dewy, translucent pink." (Ch 4)
- "His sweaty shenanigans had been separated from his family by a few feet of council-grade concrete." (Ch 6)
- "By the time the hackney had turned on the Pit Road, her children were in the hallway and Agnes, sparkling and fluffy, was lying like a party dress that had been dropped on the floor." (Ch 8)
- "It's got peas in it," said Leek, a little hurt that his fifteen-year war against green vegetables went unnoticed." (Ch 8)
- “She had loved him, and he needed to break her completely to leave her for good. ... It wouldn't do to leave pieces of her for another man to collect and repair later.” (Ch 8)
- "The nights were gathering in again. The street lights were on, and a gang of collarless dogs wandered from stank to stank, sniffing the rotten drains. One pissed, and the others took their turns and marked the same spot." (Ch 9) A super metaphor for the humans who live in the god-forsaken mining town whose pit has closed.
- "Thirty-eight pounds a week was meant to keep and feed them all. It made mothers stand in the little shop and look at pint cartons of milk like they were a luxury." (Ch 10)
- "The women behind her did sums out loud, their lips moving as they counted, adding bread to oven chips to cigarettes and then, defeated, putting the bread quietly back on the shelf." (Ch 10) Later Agnes does the same, putting the food back and keeping her cans of lager.
- “He had grown taller but he had also sunk somehow, like bread dough stretched much too thin. ... He had slid deeper into himself and become more watchful and guarded.” (Ch 12)
- "'You should watch how you walk. Try not to be so swishy. It only puts a target on your back.' Leek made a great pantomime of walking like Shuggie. His feet were pointed neatly outwards, his hips dipped and rolled, and the arms swung by his side like there was no solid bone in them. 'Don't cross your legs when you walk. Try and make room for your cock.' Leek grabbed at the bulge in the front of his corduroy and strode back and forth in a half strut, half lazy amble." (Ch 13)
- "She sat on the edge of the clean settee with a can of courage and hissed it open." (Ch14)
- “Agnes's face was very thickly made up, and it looked to Shuggie like the paint had been layered over several other faces she had forgotten to take off first.” (Ch 15)
- "There was a smell of pine about him, from the kind of aftershave that smelled like bathroom cleaner, not a trace of sex in it." (Ch 17)
- “He took her hands and tried to tug her from the chair the way plumbers pull a stubborn clog out of a drain.” (Ch 17)
- "As with any good weather, there was always more rain on the other side." (Ch 18)
- “The redhead was staring at his feet as though there were a story written on his shoes.” (Ch 19)
- “She’d looked as happy as he could ever remember, and he was surprised how this hurt. it was all for the red-headed man. He had done what Shuggie had been unable to do.” (Ch 20)
- "He couldn't worry about next week. He'd have to worry about the rest of this week first." (Ch 24)
- “His face flushed a liar’s pink.” (Ch 29)
- "Ah think the more ye love someone the more they take the piss out of that. They will do less and less of what you want and more and more of just as they fuckin' please." (Ch 32)
A wonderfully written book; a worthy winner of the 2020 Booker Prize.
January 2021, reread and reblogged March 2025; 430 pages
First published in the UK by Picador in 2020.
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