POWERFUL, from cover to end, throughout this book I could relate to aspects from it from my own childhood being raised in a home with a war damaged father who turned to drink and a mother who joined him so that she could numb the anger and despair. As a child it is like living like as a whipped puppy and like Shuggie there is the IRRATIONAL COMMITMENT to a parent who loves you for all the right and wrong reasons, but can never find a balance or strength to live normally day to day. Shugggie’s lives in a constant survival mode and on top of this he has to deal with his own sexual identity. A reader will read the mean nasty nature of humans who are in fact wolves dressed up in sheep’s clothing. As you read you, you say to yourself, surely Agnes will get better, come on girl you’ve got pride, you want to punch Eugene and those pit women and children deserve what they get. Then you reassure yourself and say thank goodness this is only a narrative, but like all narratives they have a basis from fact and there is a lot of truth in this book, physical- sexual abuse as well as experimentation by children of life that is well beyond their years. Children are being raised by addicted parents and sadly become damaged as well and once broken the cracks are always there. ( )

In Misery

Media: Audio
Read by Douglas King
Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins

“A terribly tragic and horrible story of the increasing degradation and poverty of a working class family. Accounts of terrible physical and mental abuse.” - BookAddict review

Yes it’s from a review on LT, though not of Shuggie Bain - it’s of Zola’s L'Assommoir though it does describe Shuggie Bain rather well.

Personally I prefer Zola’s Gervaise to Douglas Stuart’s Agnes. Though both characters descend into drunkenness and pine over undesirable men, I could feel more sympathy for the French alcoholic and I have to believe this has something to do with the writing. Of course Zola sets a high bar.

Poverty and alcoholism don’t always go hand in hand. But they often do. Shuggie Bain’s mother who was born to a poor working class family descends into poverty and alcoholism fairly rapidly once she leaves her first husband. She makes as they say, bad choices.

When we meet Agnes she’s already been married twice but reader doesn’t find out much about her first husband who is simply referred to as “The Catholic”. She has two children Katherine and Leek from the Catholic and Shuggie from her second husband, Shuggie Bain the Elder.

Agnes is unhappy and drowns her sorrows in whatever alcoholic beverage she can get. She spends her government child support money on the grog. She drinks herself into oblivion. Katherine flees the nest and Leek follows shortly after. Shuggie the elder eventually leaves. Young Shuggie, still a child is left to care for his mother. The tragedy of the book is that Shuggie feels himself responsible for his mother’s alcoholism and believes he can save her. He gets no help. The book is set in the UK under Thatcher’s iron reign, and the welfare state, starved of funds does nothing to help.

I did not gain much from this book. I have first hand experience of, and have read enough about alcoholism and poverty, and there’s nothing new for me in Agnes’s degradations. She goes from one horrific situation to a the next, repeating her past mistakes. The book describes her decline in increasingly horror-filled detail. . I suppose that’s the point, but I could see no point in its being driven home time and time again. I did learn one thing though.

After tiring of living with her parents, Agnes moves to a house that Shuggie’s dad, big Shuggie has somehow managed secure. It’s in a run-down council estate which was built for mine workers who are now laid-off. The area is thus referred to as ”The Pits”. So that’s where the saying “going to the pits”comes from.

There’s something to be learned every da. ( )

2020 Booker Prize winner is effective in showing the circumstance of being a child identifiably "different" (gay) in an unaccepting environment, while also being carried along in the suffering of an alcoholic mother living in poverty. Shuggie has very little agency in the novel, being a child for the bulk of it, so it is rather focused on the tides that push him about and how they affect him, which perhaps is not my favorite kind of reading experience.

The novel's opening chapter is a bit of a head fake - Shuggie is 16 years old and living on his own, the rest of the book is going to be what led up to this, but it is effective in setting the sense of Shuggie as "not right" in the eyes of the community around him and in the voice of self-doubt in his own head. The strong writing however is not false, that will be carried though the novel as you would expect in a Booker winner. Take this scene of Shuggie out after work with some women from his workplace:

With every passing graze of her ringed knuckles, she clamped her fat tongue between her teeth, and kept her eyes burning into the side of his face. When Shuggie had finally flared with embarrrassment, she had tutted, and Jackie had pushed two pound notes across the table to a beaming, victorious Nora. It was a disappointment, sure, but as they drank deeper they decided it had not been a rejection exactly. Something about the boy was no right, and this was at least something they could pity.

This sense of him as "not right" has burrowed into his own mind as well, as one would expect from a life up to then of being seen as such:

In the mirror his wet hair was black as coal. As he brushed it down over his face he was surprised to find it nearly to his chin. He stared and tried to find something masculine to admire in himself: the black curls, the milky skin, the high bones in his cheeks. He caught the reflection of his own eyes in the mirror. It wasn't right. It wasn't how real boys were built to be. He scrubbed at himself again.

After this opening however the novel goes back in time to show Shuggie's childhood with a self-destructive alcoholic mother, an absent father, humiliation from his peers, frequent hunger, sketchy at best school attendance, etc., as he thinks perhaps he can love his mother out of her problem - naturally an entirely doomed effort which provides the novel with pathos upon pathos.

Besides all that, this book did expose me to a nice bit of Scots slang, to wit:

stoated = wandered around
boak = vomit
dout = short end of a cigarette
laldy = with lots of energy, gusto
sleekit = crafty, deceitful
braw = fine, pleasant
stour = swirling dust
messages = groceries
smirr = fine rain, drizzle
flitting = moving house, semi-secretly like
greeting = crying ( )

"What good was a soft boy in a hard world?" Highly recommended for all libraries. ( )

This isn't an easy read because of its content but it is so well written and descriptive I found it (strangely) an enjoyable experience. I felt privileged to be allowed to see into these lives. For me the brilliance of the writing is in the conversations between people. The two alcoholic women spending an afternoon with cans of Special Brew, the taunts and bullying of children, around a family table and the non-alcoholics failing to understand what addiction is. These and more were perfectly captured in this novel. In 1980s Glasgow, Shuggie is the youngest of a family of three. His mother is an alcoholic. They live with Shuggie's grandmother at first and then are moved to a edge-of-town housing scheme packed with cousins. Shuggie doesn't fit in and his loyalty to his proud mother is heartbreaking. I loved them both and wanted happy endings for them so much but this rollercoaster of a novel played with my emotions until the end. ( )