Summary
Narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator, Shuggie Bain begins from the point of view of the eponymous protagonist. In 1992, Shuggie Bain is sixteen years old and lives on the South Side of Glasgow. On a dull, uninspiring morning, Shuggie methodically skewers chicken carcasses to roast in the Kilfeathers supermarket deli where he works, having been too intimidated to start hairdressing school. On his break, he looks for cans of dented salmon to buy at a discount with the last of his wages.
In the morning, he wakes in the cold boarding-house bedsit where he lives alone. He is grateful to his Pakistani landlord, who didn’t ask questions or pass judgement when he, a parentless child, came looking to rent a room. In the bathroom, Shuggie studies his face and thinks there is something “not right” about it. He reflects on Mr. Darling, an alcoholic man who lives in the boarding house and who Shuggie keeps company sometimes, pretending to drink the beer Darling gives him. Outside the bathroom, Shuggie runs into Darling. Hoping to get some money from the man before he spends it, Shuggie lets his parka fall open, revealing his young slender body. Mr. Darling’s gaze burns into Shuggie. The man smiles.
The narrative moves back to 1981, when Shuggie’s mother Agnes, 39, is living with her three children and husband at her parents’ apartment in Sighthill. From the sixteenth floor, Agnes leans out the window and imagines how easy it would be to let herself fall. In the room is her mother, Lizzie, and several other women, who gamble and play cards while smoking, drinking, and eating greasy food. They speak crassly in thick Glaswegian accents. Agnes’s daughter Catherine enters with Shuggie, who is five. The women speak of Catherine’s new job in the city and how she has brains. Agnes gets the women up dancing, but Lizzie stays seated; she claims she doesn’t drink, hoping to set an example for the family. In truth, she and Agnes’s father—both Catholics—drink in secret. Eventually Big Shug, Agnes’s husband, enters. He is a vain cab driver with fading looks but a magnetic sex appeal. He offers to give Reeny, one of the women, a ride home across the street. Agnes knows this means he won’t be home for a very long time, so she sits and waits, covertly drinking and ignoring her mother’s judgment. Agnes recalls a visit she and Shug once took to Blackpool. While there, she and Shug began arguing. She drank herself silly, and he became violent with her, dragging her up the hotel stairs and forcing her legs open to rape her in their room.
Big Shug spends a damp summer night driving around Glasgow in his black hackney cab. He looks at himself in the mirrors, and hopes to pick up drunk women from clubs. He is angry when a drunk man gets in the cab and runs his mouth. Listening to the cab dispatcher Joanie Micklewhite on the CB radio calms Shug. He reflects on how Margaret Thatcher’s policies have destroyed the ship works and rail works in town, thinning out job prospects for working-class men who had been promised their fathers’ trades. After having sex in his car with a nurse who calls him from the hospital, Shug gets a call on the CB to ring Agnes at home. She slurs at him and calls him a “hoor-master.” Shug goes to eat a fish supper from a chippy (a fast-food shop), and the man asks if he still wants to rent a council house in the suburbs. Shug says he’s setting it all up. Shug then goes to pick up Joanie from the cab dispatch center. He is giddy like a child on Christmas.
Agnes and Shuggie take a bath together. Shuggie used to collect her empty beer cans and line them up, looking at the women illustrated on them. Because of this, Agnes had bought Shuggie a doll to play with. In Agnes’s room, they listen to music and Agnes tells him to dance for her, which he does, making them both laugh. Agnes hears Shug enter the apartment. Her mood dips, and she lights the curtain on fire with her cigarette. Shuggie squirms as she holds him close and tells him to be calm. Shuggie lies with her until his father enters the room and puts out the flaming curtains with wet towels. He shakes Agnes, who pretends to be asleep. When she opens her eyes, she asks, “Where the fuck have you been?”
Catherine is at work at her credit-lending job during Orange Saturday, a Protestant holiday. She reflects on how the job isn’t too demanding, and on how she became attracted to Donald Junior, Big Shug’s nephew—her step-cousin. When he tried to sleep with her, she lectured him about her Catholic values and turned him down. She arrives home to see the smoldering curtains on the ground outside the building. She doesn’t want to face her mother alone and so goes to find her brother Leek (Alexander) in a nearby pallet factory where Leek had created a hideout of blue shipping crates. In the dark, a group of young men hold her and threaten her with a knife. They release her when they realize she is also Catholic, and that she is Leek’s sister.
Catherine evades them and makes it to Leek’s lair, which is outfitted with bits of carpet and lights. He goes to hide there when Agnes is on drinking binges. She apologizes for leaving him with her, and kisses his cheek. Leek is put off by the affection and pushes her away, saying is done with feeling bad about “this shite.” They get into an argument after she looks at the impressive drawings in his notebook. He says she’s going to leave him alone with Agnes to get married to Donald. They pop out the top of the shelter and Catherine points to the nothingness in the distance, saying she heard Shug mention that’s where they were moving.
Agnes wakes the morning after burning the curtains. The night’s events come back to her and she cries tearless, self-pitying sobs. Her father Wullie says he knows he is responsible for her acting-out behavior because of how he spoiled her as a child. Her father takes her over his knee and spanks her with his belt as punishment. Lizzie kneels next to them and prayer with Wullie. While suntanning on the ground level, Lizzie tells Agnes she should have stayed with Brendan McGowan, her Catholic first husband and the father of Catherine and Leek. Agnes says she needs to move to the house Shug has secured or she’ll lose him. Lizzie disapproves of Shug’s cheating, and says the house won’t keep him from wandering away. She tells Agnes to at least get him to be a good father to Shuggie and nip Shuggie’s effeminacy in the bud because “it’s no right.”
Shug loads his possessions into red leather suitcases that Agnes has never seen, though they’re not new. She notices he keeps his things separate from the rest of the family’s as they pack up. While packing her things, Agnes remembers the day she left Brendan, when Leek was still in diapers. With no warning, she told him she was leaving and thanked him for everything. She took her children and possessions out to Shug’s waiting taxi. Inside, he gave her grief for bringing her children, complaining that he had left four of his own children when he left his wife to be with her. His wife had threatened to kill the kids by leaving the gas oven on without lighting it. Brendan had tried to get her back and had sent support money, but he eventually gave up on seeing his kids when Catherine took the surname Bain.
On the ride out to the new house, Agnes is dressed in fine clothes. She tries to be excited. Shug promises the place is green and the village is full of kind people who know each other. Steadily, the nice detached houses are replaced by a grim, sooty coal-mining town. Black charcoal dust covers what should be green. They pass a pub surrounded by out-of-work miners. Leek notices they all have his mother’s eyes and his stomach sinks. When they arrive at the housing estate, which is full of wrecked cars and run-down buildings, Agnes pulls a can of warm lager from her bag. She slurs that the place is a “shitehole.”
Analysis
Although most of Shuggie Bain takes place in the 1980s, Stuart opens the novel in 1992, when Shuggie, the protagonist, is sixteen. Seemingly without family, Shuggie lives a solitary life, and struggles to get by financially. In the low-cost boarding house where Shuggie lives, he comes into contact with Mr. Darling, an older resident who sometimes gives Shuggie money. When they drink together, Shuggie only pretends to sip his beer, letting the alcohol enter his mouth and slip back into the can—a hint at Shuggie’s complicated relationship to alcohol.
Writing cryptically and suggestively, Stuart ends the chapter with Shuggie opening his robe to the older alcoholic man, who gazes upon Shuggie’s youthful body with ravenous delight. With this image, Stuart implies that Shuggie’s poverty puts him in a position where he must use his sex appeal to survive, just as his mother Agnes did in her life. But like Agnes, Shuggie is vulnerable to predation and abuse. In this way, the opening chapter subtly introduces several of the novel’s major themes: alcoholism, poverty, and sexual abuse.
To show how Shuggie got to this point in his young life, Stuart moves the narrative back eleven years to 1981. In contrast to Shuggie’s current, solitary existence, in 1981 he was surrounded by family, all of whom lived together in his grandparents’ apartment in Sighthill, Glasgow. Stuart begins the section with a shift to the point of view of Shuggie’s mother, Agnes. Stuart immediately introduces the reader to her self-destructive nature by showing how she leans out the sixteenth-floor window and imagines falling out—an idea that excites rather than terrifies her. Agnes’s desire to have fun is also on display as she tries to convince her mother’s friends to get up and dance with her. Meanwhile, her mother, Lizzie, looks on disapprovingly, pretending that she herself doesn’t drink.
The theme of abandonment enters the story when Agnes’s husband Big Shug returns from his cab driving shift and proceeds openly to flirt with a friend of Lizzie’s. Although the woman only lives across the road, he insists on driving her home. Agnes knows he will not be home for ages because he will have sex with the woman. To console herself, Agnes drinks vodka and stays awake, thinking of the time she and Shug went to Blackpool on holiday. She had gotten too drunk for Shug’s liking, and he punished her with physical abuse and sexual assault.
As the section goes on, the point-of-view shifts to other family members. Out on his late-night shift, Shug admires himself vainly in the mirrors of his cab and casually has sex with a nurse. He speaks with a chip-shop owner about a house the family can move to, foreshadowing the family’s departure from Lizzie and Wullie’s apartment. In a rare show of positive emotion, Shug picks up the cab dispatcher from work, giddy as a child. With this detail, Stuart hints at a different variety of infidelity at play in Shug’s life. Meanwhile, Agnes’s sense of abandonment grows at the apartment. Drinking heavily, she acts out by lighting the curtains in her bedroom on fire just when Shug finally gets in.
In the chapters from the points of view of Catherine and Leek, the reader learns of how Shuggie’s older siblings have found their own ways to cope with their mother’s alcoholism. Avoiding the chaos at home, Leek hides out in a lair built in the middle of pallets, while Catherine makes plans to marry and get away from her mother’s dysfunctional behavior. As they speak, the siblings oscillate between hostility and tenderness, unable to express their feelings of hopelessness with true vulnerability. However, it is clear they have developed a mutual support system in the midst of their mother’s dysfunction. Unable to rely on their mother for emotional support, they rely on each other.
The Sighthill sections end with Shug moving the family out to their own council house. As they pack, Agnes reflects on how she abandoned her first husband to be with Shug. In contrast to Shug, Brendan McGowan had been subdued and dependable, but ultimately too boring for Agnes. Shug had expected her to abandon the children with McGowan when she left, but Agnes couldn’t bring herself to abandon her children like Shug had. Although Shug leads Agnes and the kids to believe the new house is in a nice green neighborhood, in reality, the house is in an economically depressed mining town full of coal dust and alcoholic out-of-work miners and their wives. Far from the new start Agnes hoped for, the sight of the place makes her drain the beer she hides in her purse. The action foreshadows how her alcoholism will worsen while she lives in Pithead.
