"Shuggie Bain" by Douglas Stuart

It's brilliant. 

This is a frame narrative: the opening and closing chapters are set in 1992 and records a day in the life of Shuggie, a fifteen year old boy living on his own in a bedsit in Glasgow. The bulk of the book chronicles Shuggie's growing up as a boy who's 'no quite right'; son of taxi driver and ladies man Shug and his second wife Agnes, a very beautiful woman whose alcoholism destroys her family: driving away her husband and her daughter and her tragic son Leek, a gifted artist. It is a story of terrible sadness and enormous authenticity. 

Apart from the frame, the narrative time scheme is linear. It is told from multiple perspectives including Shug, Agnes, Shuggie and Catherine.

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. 

Favourite moments:

• "On particularly low days he folded all types of his bodily discharge into the taramasalata. He sold an uncanny amount of that bourgeois shite." (C 1)
• "A life bought on tick, with nothing that ever felt owned outright." (C 2)
• "He was a selfish animal, she knew that now, in a dirty, sexual way that aroused her against her better nature." (C 2)
• "He watched them rub their pink arms in the cold night air and shelf their tits over tight-folded arms." (C 3)
• "He was golden, though in reality, he was more of a dewy, translucent pink." (C 4)
• "His sweaty shenanigans had been separated from his family by a few feet of council-grade concrete." (C 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." (C 8)
• "It's got peas in it," said Leek, a little hurt that his fifteen-year war against green vegetables went unnoticed." (C 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." (C 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." (C 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." (C 10) Later Agnes does the same, putting the food back and keeping her cans of lager.
• "'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. Tray 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." (C 13)
• "She sat on the edge of the clean settee with a can of courage and hissed it open." (C 14)
• "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." (C 17)
• "As with any good weather, there was always more rain on the other side." (C 18)
• "He couldn't worry about next week. He'd have to worry about the rest of this week first." (C 24)
• "It's too much, Mammy. I can't be the one to save everybody all the time." (C 24)
• "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." (C 32)

A wonderfully written book; a worthy winner of the 2020 Booker Prize.

The writer of this review, Dave Appleby, 
is author of the novel Motherdarling