I used to ask myself, \u2018What right do I have to write this?\u2019\u00a0Shuggie Bain\u00a0is about a voice from the margins that doesn\u2019t get heard often. \u2026 Working-class voices are still struggling for representation in a middle-class industry.<\/em><\/p>\nThe bulk of the novel relates the experience of growing up at a time when Thatcherite policies devastated Scotland\u2019s industries, with a stark rise in unemployment. The once thriving Scottish steel, car, shipbuilding, mining and engineering industries were destroyed, along with the communities that worked in them.<\/p>\n
\u2018No. No more school. We need the money.\u2019 \u2018Aye. The state of the day\u2019s world ye\u2019ll be supporting any man ye do get.\u2019 The women all had men at home. Men rotting into the settee for want of decent work.<\/em><\/p>\nFew women work either. They buy items they cannot afford from the Freemans catalogue and find themselves ever deeper in debt, with large families and the:<\/p>\n
\u2026..last holiday most of them had seen was a stay on the Stobhill maternity ward.<\/em><\/p>\nNan applied the pressure like she had a thousand times and went about collecting money from all the women and marking it in their books. It would be an eternity to pay off a pair of children\u2019s school trousers or a set of bathroom towels. Five pounds a month would take years to pay off when the interest was added on top. It felt like they were renting their lives. The catalogue opened to a new page, and the women started fighting over who wanted what.<\/em><\/p>\nThe novel portrays this working-class experience through the eyes of Shuggie, growing up with an alcoholic mother, Agnes.<\/p>\n
The reader is introduced to the working-class circle around Agnes. Her father had been a labourer:<\/p>\n
These were hands that had loaded grain trucks for twenty years, hands that had laid pungent tarmacadam, hands that had killed Italians in North Africa. He was one of the few who returned \u2013 there were many sons from Glasgow, from Inverness and Edinburgh, who had sacrificed and would never be coming home.<\/em><\/p>\nDespite their common lot, the working people are shown to be divided along denominational lines \u2013 Catholic and Protestant, with the same prejudices as across the Irish Sea. Agnes\u2019 first husband and father of her older children was a Catholic working man, whom she leaves for the sexier Eugene Bain, a Protestant hackney driver and father of Shuggie. This second husband moves the family out of his in-laws\u2019 council flat and into an equally deprived mining community, before abandoning them. Part of the reason for this is Agnes\u2019 drinking.<\/p>\n
The reader gets the close-up view through young Shuggie\u2019s eyes of his mother\u2019s complete unravelling and the suffering it brings to her children. His older siblings initially help protect their mother but ultimately realise that they cannot save her. Her condition thwarts her children\u2019s potential through Shuggie\u2019s schooling and Leek\u2019s artistic talent.<\/p>\n
Despite an interlude of hope with the help of the AA, a job, and her children at school and happy, this does not last. Alcoholism and its effect on people and communities is explored in detail from the perspective of a loving and protective child, who observes all the secrecies, shame and suicidal self-hate that it brings. Agnes is not alone \u2013 either with this ravaging illness, nor in terms of support offered to her by people close to her. The addiction, it seems, is endemic in this community and an expression of its own destruction.<\/p>\n
Douglas Stuart knows intimately what he writes about. His mother struggled with alcoholism and died when the author was sixteen. And while what we read is fiction, it is deeply informed by Stuart\u2019s own childhood. He comes from \u201ca long and proud tradition of slaters and joiners and tradespeople.\u201d He takes pride in his class and says that despite an absence of books in his childhood and youth, \u201cit didn\u2019t make us any less caring, any less empathetic.\u201d Stuart writes this into the book. There is a very strong sense of solidarity and community. By writing this story, he shows that this community is an important subject of literature and art.<\/p>\n
James Kelman<\/strong><\/p>\nIn its 52-year history, Stuart is the second Scottish writer to be awarded the prize. The only other Scot to win it, James Kelman, also a working-class writer, programmatically writes in the idiom of his people. The novel that controversially won him the Booker Prize, was \u201cHow Late it Was, How Late\u201d. This is a stream-of-consciousness narration of an unemployed alcoholic Glaswegian, in and out of jail, battered and blinded, disregarded by society, and yet somehow a resilient survivor.<\/p>\n
For Stuart, Kelman\u2019s Booker win was seminal. It showed him that the Glasgow vernacular had a rightful place in literature, that literature was not the preserve of the middle and upper classes, but must be owned by the working class as one way of telling its story. He says:<\/p>\n
It changed everything in literature for me. Not only was it about working-class people, it was written in a broad Scots dialect. That\u2019s how people around me talked, but you rarely see that in literature, rarely see it celebrated. It was an affirming moment for me.<\/em><\/p>\nWhile neither Kelman\u2019s nor Stuart\u2019s novels indicate characters and ways of combatting the outrageous economic and cultural deprivation of the Scottish working class, they nevertheless describe this class with insight and regard, indeed love, as a class that is entitled to their equal share in the nation\u2019s wealth.<\/p>\n
Shuggie Bain is published by Grove Press, New York, 2020<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jenny Farrell review Douglas Stuart’s new novel Douglas Stuart won the 2020 Booker prize for his debut novel Shuggie Bain, set in his home town of Glasgow…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":456,"featured_media":14073,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1661],"tags":[2243],"class_list":["post-14074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction-2","tag-james-kelman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/456"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/cae7a9a438563ec1379122c78f3da79d.jpg\")
<\/p>\n