What a year to win the Booker Prize?! To be forever linked in people’s memory with a global pandemic – and guess what? The winner totally suits the mood of 2020 – tentative hope mixed with chronic despair. My father, who has been following along on this Booker journey over the years, despite his dedication to reading them all rather waning in recent times, actually bought this book (because it’s set in Scotland apparently). He read it before me and described it as an “emotional roller-coaster” - so I was duly forewarned. However, I found it less an emotional roller-coaster and more a trudging ride through misery on a grimy bus that kept breaking down. The story centres on the chaotic maelstrom surrounding the alcohol-dependence of Shuggie’s mother Agnes and therefore as you can probably imagine, ends up being a bleak read.
Stuart’s descriptions of the various settings in this book are grim and evoke a soul-destroying sense of place and grinding poverty. With full awareness of my own privileged upbringing, I struggled to picture the hellish descriptions of the closed and polluted Pithead and what my imagination conjured up was so repulsive and abhorrent to me that I desperately wanted to remove everyone from the situation. Stuart also did a brilliant job of not turning the characters into caricatures of good vs. bad or right vs. wrong; as the book’s major success is conveying the huge complexity of humans’ responses to the circumstances and relationships in which they find themselves. This inspires a huge level of empathy from the reader for the characters in this story and I hope that it goes some way to dispel a lot of the stigma and shame that exists around addiction. Perhaps the key to the vivid descriptions and nuanced characters is how this book is based on the author’s own early life, giving authenticity to the storytelling. It also leads to me having a huge amount of respect for him being able to write about these traumatic events and yet more empathy for what he endured.
The story is equal parts heart-wrenching and heart-breaking and while reading I sunk into a feeling of hopelessness that cast a mood that stretched out beyond the time I spent within the pages of this book. The book is soaked in realism, and the thought of people experiencing what occurs in this book every day is difficult to comprehend, especially a child, and all the more so as he had the added burden of being tormented for being different to contend with. The lonely isolation of all the older characters walled up in their various defences against the realities of life contrasted so harshly with the vulnerability of this young child – his softness and tenderness - as he sought the love and care that he so desperately needed and, as a result, was very hard to read.
It feels appropriate that this book won the prize in 2020 as I hope that it can act as a warning against the pandemic worsening an already difficult situation for those living in poverty. This book graphically and emotionally describes the impact of a lack of resources; desperately reducing options and choices available to make things better and the wide-reaching damage of the various harmful coping strategies that just make the whole situation worse. Although it was hard to read, it’s an incredibly important perspective that deserves to be heard and shared. As I’ve often discussed before on this blog – reading is a vital way to increase people’s empathy and understanding of people’s lives and inner world that lie beyond our direct experience and, as ever, the Booker is doing a good job of promoting these books to a wider audience.
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