Shuggie Bain

Paperback - 430 pages · 2020 – Picador

Devotion as Entrapment

Shuggie Bain opens with a boy already stranded. Sixteen, working a deli counter, living in a rented room. Douglas Stuart moves backward to show how he reached that point. What follows is a pattern that repeats and wears him down.

Shuggie moves from Sighthill to Pithead to the East End of Glasgow, always with his mother Agnes, who drinks. The settings change. The arrangement stays the same. People leave. Money runs out. The house becomes harder to keep together.

The pressure comes from repetition. Agnes sobers up, finds work, meets a man, steadies the house for a time, and then it breaks again. She drinks. The cycle returns with small changes: a new place, a different man, less time before it collapses. The reader recognises the pattern before Shuggie does, a repetition that also governs Stoner, where endurance replaces change. He keeps hoping it will hold. The pattern does not release in The Lamb.

Shuggie’s devotion is the mechanism and the damage. It begins as watchfulness: noticing shifts in Agnes’s mood, adjusting to them, covering for her. Over time it becomes fixed behaviour. He does not step back. He keeps going. Catherine, his older sister, leaves first and does not return to the household. Leek, his older brother, leaves later after seeing that nothing changes. One by one, people remove themselves. Shuggie stays.

That staying depends on Agnes. She is not absent or dulled. She is alert to how she looks, proud, quick to anger, quick to charm. She can be attentive and cutting within the same exchange. She asks for attention and gives it back unevenly. Shuggie is not caring for someone who has disappeared. He is reacting to someone who is still there, shifting from moment to moment.

Outside the home, the pressure continues. At school Shuggie is marked early as different, before he can name it himself, a pressure that also shapes John of John, where masculinity is disciplined through silence and place. The difference is read in his manner, his voice, his body. He is named and singled out for it. The difference being named is queerness, read by others before Shuggie has words for it. The bullying is repeated and physical. It keeps him apart from other children. At home, his father, Big Shug, does not offset this. He does not shelter his son from judgement. He adds to it. There is no place where the pressure lifts.

Moving house does not change this. Sighthill, Pithead and the East End differ in appearance and work, but the same pattern continues. Agnes remains the focus of the household. Shuggie remains the one closest to her.

The ending returns to the position at the start. Shuggie, now sixteen, stands by the river with Leanne. They dance. Earlier, his movements are organised around Agnes, shaped by the need to steady her and hold the household together. Here, the movement is no longer organised by service. It is brief.

The situation around him does not change. The book shows a child shaped by the need to keep loving someone who cannot protect him. Attachment can survive almost anything. That does not make it redemptive.

Part of Reading Masculinity.