Recently, I caught up with the latest season of The Crown while simultaneously reading Shuggie Bain. Both are excellent and each gives a different perspective (obviously!) on Margaret Thatcher and her deeply reviled economic austerity. In The Crown, as played by Gillian Anderson (whose stiff voice and crooked, purse-slung arm will forever be my vision the Prime Minister), Thatcher is tough but human, a woman interloper in a man’s world. She was, amazingly, sympathetic.
Thatcher never appears directly in Shuggie Bain, but Thatcherism is omnipresent, as it must have been throughout England during that time period. The poverty, the alcoholism, the despair, the crappy housing projects. As she would have said, people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But what if you have no boots?
This is an excellent book to read if you want that bootless experience. The poverty and the despair is palpable — the characters are so well-drawn, the details so immediate — but there is a lightness to the prose. Also, in a book like this it’s so easy to create victims and villains. Douglas Stuart doesn’t do that. Even Shuggie’s father, Shug, is three dimensional and almost sympathetic. Though maybe not in one of my favorite quotes from the book:
“Shug picked up his money belt and kissed her with a forceful tongue. He had to squeeze all the small bones in her hands to get her to release him. She had loved him, and he had needed to break her completely to leave her for good. Agnes Bain was too rare a thing to let someone else love. It wouldn’t do to leave pieces of her for another man to collect and repair later.”
Kate Staples 