Douglas Stewart won the Booker Prize for fiction with Shuggie Bain, an autobiographical novel about a boy dealing with an alcoholic father. Shuggie is a young boy (the novel is mainly set in Glasgow) who is notable for his la-di-dah speech and apparent desire to be different. Agnes, his mother, is an alcoholic. She does not try to hide the fact. Anything will do, but the can of Special Brew figures big and often. She earns what she can in any way she can to finance her habit and pools the family’s profits for the cause. Obviously, she’s not looking for a job, because she could never be dependent enough to trust her. And she knows it.
Shuggie and her much older brother Leek often go hungry. They are often cold, not only because there is usually not a fifty pence to feed the meter, but also because what was put in the meter has been recycled to buy more alcohol. The television often doesn’t work either, because it’s a paid time slot type and it’s also emptied. Mother Agnes is in a relationship with Shuggie’s father, who is named Shug. She has another relationship with Eugene. Both men are taxi drivers and both have increased in size after years of sedentary work. The action, if that’s the right word, takes place in Glasgow and then in Pithead, a run-down and already depressed mining community, if that’s a relevant tag for the location described. It is in these two working-class communities that Shuggie and his brother grow up, mature before their age, and get by, because that’s the best they can do with so much against them.
Shuggie Bain is a story of survival. It is, in its own way, a story of human dignity and perseverance in the face of adversity. However, it is very one-dimensional. I persevered with the book more out of duty, more out of a desire to support it than out of any real interest in what might happen to its characters. Long before the end, not only was he quite tired of repeating the same scenario, but he had also lost interest in the results. Maybe that was the point. If so, it became a plow.
There is always a dilemma for a writer when characters speak in dialect or with an accent. How much of the speech sound should be written down? Is it wise to change the spelling of common words to indicate a different pronunciation from standard English? One problem with much of 19th century fiction is that the middle classes seem to speak correctly, but as soon as the working class character appears, the apostrophes suddenly appear to erase all the aitches. Personally, I prefer writers not to write with an accent. The problem is that many times it doesn’t work. In Yorkshire, one might ask, “What are you doing with your pen?” and the answer could be “Raaatin”. I come from a place where the word bus is pronounced bus, not bas or bis. With a high-class character, would you ever write “Air hair lair, Ha-aa-yo?” “Em fen, thiyank me.” to indicate privilege, except when he wanted to humiliate them and their class?
In Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart chooses to write much of the quoted speech in a Glasgow dialect version, with alternate spellings to indicate the uniqueness of the sound. It does not work. He makes these characters sometimes unintelligible, sometimes comical. An example will illustrate it. Precisely why “fitba” should be used instead of football, I have no idea. Would a novel set in London use a line like “Wew, vez an awfuw lo’ o’ wewwintns in vat sho”? Maybe not, even if it was a rubber boot store.
I was really looking forward to the book being successful. And she did, his way. It’s well worth a read and the character progression becomes interesting, if never really engaging. Maybe that’s the point of him. But there always seems to be a lot of wood to clear to get to the trees.