Shuggie Bain: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner) Paperback – 13 Oct. 2020

I read this book and can relate to the unemployment, the poverty and the destruction of communities that happened in Scotland at this time and still does .I do have one big gripe with this book and it is the way he has portrayed the mining communityI was brought up in a mining community before during and after the closure of the pits by Thatcher and her toxic governmentThe author portrays the miners as heartless dirty useless drunkards and the women as feckless loveless hags The children run around as feral animals covered in filth He sees the community as people with no pride in themselves.He describes a scene where a woman has just found out her husband has cheated on her ,she is outside and rips her skirt in distress to reveal she has no underwear on! as if to suggest she is such a slob she can't be bothered to cover her dignity. Shame on him for his portrayal of these womenThe mining community I know are proud hard working resourceful people who look after each other Who are intelligent and quick witted especially when it comes to politicsGardens are their pride, my family and neighbours gardens had blossoming flower beds in the front and an array of vegetables in the back garden. They also tended allotments. We were all well feed with an abundance of healthy fresh fruit and vegetables not just boiled cabbage.We were all spotlessly clean as well due to the diligence of the women. Miners working in thick black coal dust day in day out didn't give in to it, they hated it. If you met a miner after work or on his days off you would be hard pressed to find a more clean spotlessly tidy man and mums made sure their families were the same . Ah but not according to the author They were all filthy stoor covered inbreds(everyone is a cousin ) with no pride in how they dressed.I recently read an interview he gave describing his upbringing and I am happy hes has done so well howeverIt has made me very angry that this book will be read world wide and he has given the impression that this is how we lived. Sighthill looked like utopia compared to Pit head I am not impressed. .

An addictive read. The story was so intense and scenes set with exceptional descriptive ability. Felt like an emotional roller coaster at points. An exceptionally talented writer who made me laugh and almost cry. I did have to ask my Glaswegian husband to translate a few words, despite being very familiar with phrases. I hope this book is made in to a film. It deserves to be.

Ostensibly the story of an effeminate, hard-done-by lad named Shuggie growing up in rough and tough Glasgow during the Thatcher era, Shuggie Bain is really an homage to his alcoholic mother Agnes.This book saw me plunge into a grim mood. The message I took from Shuggie Bain was that men are brutes… And women aren’t much better. Except for Shuggie and Agnes, of course, who are loosely based on the author Douglas Stuart and his mother. “It’s not a memoir,” Stuart told The Scotsman, “and it’s not strictly autobiographical, but I definitely grew up incredibly poor, raised on benefits, and I am the queer son of a single mother who lost her own battle with alcoholism when I was still in high school.” As a result, Stuart always paints Agnes lovingly, and Shuggie too.There is much to admire about this debut novel. Shuggie Bain is brimming with rich description and creditably tells the story of an underclass that has seldom been represented so affectionately in respectable British literature since Dickens. The plot is crystal clear as one horror follows another with barely any reprieve. The characters are well-drawn. The dialogue, replete with Glaswegian vernacular, is plausible and often humorous.It opens in 1992 and depicts 16-year-old Shuggie’s piteous poverty. He works in a supermarket and lives in a bedsit. He spends his mornings defending himself against the cold and the keyhole-peering predations of older men: “Shuggie could feel it burn into his pale chest as the man’s gaze slid down over his loose underwear to his bare legs”. I question whether opening the novel in 1992 in order to flashback to 1981 was necessary. Draughts and pervy older drunks are gritty, but by unveiling—or undressing—the teenaged Shuggie, the prologue unintentionally immunised the reader from the hardships Shuggie was to face later (or, you might say, earlier). In particular, I felt the opening diminished the impact of what ought to have been a harrowing moment when the younger Shuggie inevitably—such was the trajectory of this novel—got sexually assaulted. However, take away the opening section and the switch back in time and there would be nothing particularly innovative in terms of structure or form.Michael Delgado points out another criticism in the Literary Review: “Stuart never fully settles on a coherent narrative voice. [...] It’s hard to believe that Shuggie’s abusive father would look out at George Square and think of ‘the city at peace, before it got ruined by the diurnal masses’.” The inability to settle on a clear narrative point of view hampers the book fundamentally. Because the novel is not about Shuggie nor entirely about Agnes either, the author feels at liberty to narrate offshoots of other lives. From Shuggie’s siblings to Agnes’s parents, it feels as if half the inhabitants of Glasgow get a chapter to themselves. The result is that the book is overlong: 400 pages feels like 600.Understandably, given that Stuart is writing from lived experiences, the depiction of Glasgow, replete with tower blocks, motorway bridges and a monumental slag heap, is what Scots might call “dreich” (dull or gloomy). The novel captures the drudgery and the trauma of working-class life all too well. Something dreadful happens in almost every chapter—arson, knife crime, corporal punishment of a 39-year-old woman, rape, death by cancer, death by suicide, fighting, more rape, attempted suicide. Perhaps Stuart was making the point that living with an alcoholic mother, an absent father and vile surroundings is predictable only insofar as every day is guaranteed to bring new unpredictable horrors.As a gay reader only too accustomed to bleak LGBT coming-of-age stories, I agree with booktuber Matthew Sciarappa that this book would have felt more timely ten years ago or more. It would have made a startling working-class counterpoint to the gay protagonist’s London high life in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, similarly set in the 1980s, which won the Booker Prize in 2004. Was this 2020 novel, from a Scottish New Yorker, supposed to make LGBT readers grateful for how far society has come? Perhaps.This year, four debut novels including Shuggie Bain were shortlisted, after the Booker Prize judges inexcusably shunted aside Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light, without doubt the most accomplished novel on the longlist. As I said when the shortlist was revealed, despite its problems Shuggie Bain was one of the best books left in a competition that in the last couple of years has become, regrettably, little more than an overhyped celebration of popular fiction.

It was so sad to follow Shuggie's mum's slow decline into alcholism and how some women 'need' a man to define who they are and how sex is used as a manipulative transaction. I found the ending to be 'oh, is that it?' as I was left wanting to know more about how Shuggie moved on - hopefully finally embracing being 'different', and if his brother ever did go to university and if ever they saw their sister again.

I used to be an avid reader, but after years, of finding it impossible to dedicate myself, to any book, this book broke the i can't read a book spell. I was in the place i like to be while reading, and thats actually there, witnessing the events, that are beautifully written, taking place. I didn't feel pushed out due to lack of comprehension. This book coaxed all my senses awake.