"Shuggie Bain" by Douglas Stuart

In 2020 a debut novel by a Scotsman beat six short-listed competitors to win the Booker Prize, perhaps the most prestigious award for fiction in the UK. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart is set in 1980s Glasgow and tells the story of the working-class Bain family, a single mother and her three children. It was a time of collective hardship: under the Margaret Thatcher government, unemployment went up to 26 per cent in the city, drink and drug-use soared, and life expectancy lowered. Stuart spoke to us about the novel, which, he says, took him ten years to write and which was rejected by publishers forty-four times. Now, translated into multiple languages, it was rarely off best books lists last year. Stuart began by telling us what Shuggie Bain was about. 

Douglas Stuart (Scottish accent): Shuggie Bain is the story of the Bain family and the head of this family is Agnes Bain, who is a very proud, glamorous, beautiful defiant mother. Her second husband relocates the family to a mining town just on the outside of the city and then decides he is going to leave her. When he does this, Agnes begins to spiral into addiction and her three children Catherine, Leek and Shuggie stay by their mother’s side and try to save their mother from herself. Shuggie, her youngest son is also dealing with his own feelings of otherness: he is a very effeminate, precocious, fussy little boy and the other boys and the men around him see that he is very different to them and they treat him with violence and isolation.

YOUNG, QUEER AND POOR

Stuart now lives in New York, where he works in the fashion world. However, Shuggie Bain draws on his own childhood experiences, growing up in poverty in Glasgow. 

Douglas Stuart: I grew up as poor as Shuggie, I was raised on government benefits. I came from a working-class family that lost a lot of its opportunities underneath the Thatcher government. I am queer. I was a queer young man growing up in a place of very narrow masculinity and also I’m the youngest son of a single mother who struggled with alcoholism. When things happen to you as a child, when you suffer trauma or you suffer loss, you feel very centred in that experience and in writing a work of fiction you have to consider the characters’ motivations and the characters’ context, so it was a way for me to go back and really think what was it like to be a working-class woman who had left school early to give her life to her children, her home, her husband and then suddenly those things collapse around her. 

PRIVATE LIVES

In the British working-class fiction we are more familiar with, that of Irvine Welsh or the films of Ken Loach, the story centres on heterosexual men on the picket line, in the pubs or on the streets. Shuggie Bain, however, centres on the home, the women, and on little Shuggie himself as a young queer boy. 

Douglas Stuart: For me in these times of mass upheaval, the strength of a city, the strength of a community, the strength of a home, was always the women that were in that home and we often don’t get to hear from them in literature because so much of their lives are private. It’s not just a book about the sorority between women it’s also about how women come apart in these moments. Queer voices in literature are often in the middle class or the upper middle class because there’s an enormous amount of mobility there and one of the things that the book tries to deal with is how do you belong in the place you are when you cannot leave that place.

GLASWEGIAN SPIRIT

The novel deals with many social issues: poverty, addiction, homophobia, misogyny, sectarianism... but while it is a tough book, it is full of tenderness and humour, says Stuart. 

Douglas Stuart: Sometimes when you don’t have the comfort of money and life throws something difficult at you, all you can really do is try and smile and laugh your way through it. So, throughout the book I try to juxtapose the human condition, whether it’s tenderness with violence, whether it’s sadness cut with humour, because that is the Glaswegian spirit. 

KEEPING UP APPEARANCES

Working-class pride and shame are integral to the book. We asked Stuart about how accent and image in the UK still define perceptions of the other. 

Douglas Stuart: Pride and shame are very important in the book, and one of the ways that that shows up is that the characters speak in their natural tongue, a very broad Glaswegian dialect. Except Agnes thinks this is limiting for her, and so she affects an accent that makes her sound like a newscaster or a woman from a very affluent part of town, and this increases her isolation. Agnes is a woman who even in the most difficult times would never go without her hair perfectly set, her face beautifully made up, the best clothes, even though she’s starving or she’s very desperately hurt or she’s disintegrating. And so she always presents this outward face to the world, which really the other women can see through very clearly. 

AN AMAZING TRIBUTE

Expectations and limitations as a cause of isolation and conflict is something that affects us all. Stuart says that his book was an attempt to come to terms with the city he loved and left, and that is why, he says, he was incredibly proud when he heard that a mural had been painted in Glasgow dedicated to Shuggie.  

Douglas Stuart: Glasgow has painted an enormous mural as a tribute to Shuggie Bain on the side of one of our most important buildings in the city, the Barrowland Ballroom. And for me, I’d written the book as a love letter to Glasgow: it doesn’t always have to be flattering; Glaswegians wouldn’t tolerate you saying false things! They’re very real people. And so to see my words in the book then reflected on the city that inspires them, actually was the most meaningful thing to me.

FROM SHUGGIE TO MUNGO 

The name ‘Shuggie’ is a typically Scottish name, though it is not commonly used today. ‘Shuggie’ or ‘Shug’ is a Scottish form of a more familiar name in Britain, Hugh, which actually has origins in Old French and Old German. Douglas Stuart chose the name well for his protagonist, as it means ‘soul’, ‘mind’, or ‘intellect’. 

Young Mungo is the title of Douglas Stuart’s new book, out this April. Set in Glasgow in 1992, the name refers to St. Mungo, the patron saint of Glasgow, and it is also the name of the novel’s protagonist, a 15-year-old working-class Protestant boy. Mungo, a name thought to mean ‘most dear’, is of Scottish and Gaelic origin, and is a nickname for the ancient name Kentigern.