The book opens with fifteen-year-old Shuggie Bain living hand to mouth in the South Side of Glasgow in 1992, but swiftly rewinds ten years to place him in his family home in the Sighthill area of the city.
It is a blended, multi-generational family shoehorned into a high rise flat. Shuggie’s mother, Agnes Bain, is the lynch pin: Lizzie and Wullie Campbell are her parents, and it is their flat; taxi driver Shug (Hugh) is her second husband; teenagers Catherine and Leek (Alexander) are the leftovers from her first marriage; and Shuggie (little Hugh) is the product of Shug’s loins. The household shows the strains inherent in the situation with fraught relationships and alcohol the go-to remedy.
Big Shug finally has enough. He relocates his family (stepchildren included) to a housing scheme in the Glasgow hinterland, built to house miners who are now jobless, hopeless, and invisible. Agnes is dismayed, and immediately the family begins a slow disintegration that lasts seven years. Agnes’ drinking gets worse, and the slow motion car crash of her life begins in earnest.
Shuggie grows up in the chaos, not helped by his self-awareness, reinforced by his neighbours and peers, that he is ‘not normal’. Despite the neglect by Agnes and abuse from the rest of the world, he remains good-natured and develops a creditable self-sufficiency.
Although Shuggie has the title role, he shares the spotlight with his mother. Agnes is a mass of contradictions: obsessive about keeping up appearances when sober but grossing out when drunk; her love for Shuggie is evident but her neglect is shocking. Only Shuggie sticks with her, to his cost.
The writing treads
the fine line between harrowing and heart-warming. It is insightful on
alcoholism and a testimony on how some communities were affected by the
de-industrialisation wrought by the Thatcher years. That the author emerged
from a similar upbringing to produce a fine book like this, gives us hope for Shuggie
too.
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