Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

 A Review

A hard-working, working class Scottish Catholic Father brings up his daughter like a princess giving her his best in everything he could afford. The girl grows up well and gets married and has two kids, a son and a daughter. Her husband is almost like her father, hardworking and committed to the family, bringing home his wages unlike the other Glasgow men who spend most of their weekly wages on wee drinks.   

The young wife soon loses the charm in her settled life and is longing for some action and change. When her second baby is still in her nappies she (at twenty six) runs away from her husband with a taxi driver taking both her kids against the good advice of her parents.

Life looks exciting for a while but soon, though she has got the change she was longing for, she finds out it is nothing like she expected. The protestant man she gets married to and whose name she adopts for her children is unfortunately, in her own words, “..horing bastard”. This reality and the disappointment that come with it destroy her and lead her to alcoholism and later the addiction completely wrecks her family. As soon as the “..horing Casanova” realizes she has gone beyond repair after her suicide attempt he tempts her to leave her parents’ house where they have been living ever since she broke her first marriage and takes her to an abandoned mining quarters far away from Glasgow city and leaves her.

Shuggie Bain is the story of her children over a period of 16 years, two - born from her first husband and one - from the second, how they struggled while growing up, to protect themselves from a self-destructing mother and their love for their mother to protect her from her own harmful self. Douglas Stuart has very successfully portrayed the love, the drama, the anxiety, the poverty and grief from the perspective of the third child whose name is Shuggie Bain.

“…it doesn’t cost anything extra to look your best” is Shuggie Bain’s mother’s favourite quote and Douglas wrote a heart breaking novel drawing a lot from his own life experience which won him the Booker Prize for 2020. The book gives an international reader a realistic view of the working class life in Glasgow, Scotland of the 80’s.