Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart- book review

Shuggie Bain has received the highly prestigious Booker Prize for 2020. So, there must be something extra-ordinary about the book's story-line, characters, language, impact on society or something else.

That's right. The Booker Prize website says, Laying bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride, Shuggie Bain is a blistering and heartbreaking debut, and an exploration of the unsinkable love that only children can have for their damaged parents. 

No doubt, the book has what the Booker Prize Foundation found superb in the novel.

The story in short is that of Shuggie, the boy, and his mother. They live in poverty, which is accentuated by his alcoholic mother's acts. While his father and siblings leave her one by one, he keeps hoping till the end to bring her back from the brink by being good to her and being a ‘normal’ (more masculine) male.

Stuart has portrayed very well the nuances of life in poor, crowded colonies of 1980’s Glasgow. The story is straight, the language full of local dialect and slang, and descriptions of locale are so specific that the story looks authentic. But the authenticity and strong points of the novel end here - for me.

On Goodreads, I am among the rare few who have not given the novel a 5-star rating. For me, it does deserves just 3. Why?

It is a difficult read. The narration gets disjointed and repetitive at times. For me, it is difficult to empathize with many characters (other than the main ones) and the fleeting way they do all types of dirty things and get away. A cab driver tries to abuse the boy but ends up waiving off the charge, another driver catches hold of Shuggie within a sentence of narration even while he had runs away a long distance, and so on. Many characters are interested in drinks, smoking and sex – and this is at display ad nauseum. Maybe it achieves the aim of making the novel depressing – and it is liked by readers interested in a piece of depressing fiction. 

Shuggie’s mother’s alcoholism and seeking sex for money attain a routine status in the novel, as if giving them deeper and nuanced treatment would take away Shuggie’s importance. Males having sex on the fly and the entire family accepting it as routine does not sound natural, even in highly permissive societies.

Relationships also are fleeting. Even Shuggie’s sufferings look casual, not deep. I am also puzzled how at Shuggie’s worldview – at times he is shown to think and visualise things much ahead of his age. 

 ⭐⭐⭐ out of 5