A life distilled
Douglas Stuart’s ‘love-letter to Glasgow’ is a grim but tender tale of a boy left to care for his alcoholic mother.
sometimes stylish, a woman of character who is nevertheless on the alcoholic’s long journey to the grave or, rather, the crematorium. The daughter of devout and loving Catholics, she had two children, Catherine and Leek, with her first husband before leaving him for Shug, a Protestant taxi-driver, magnetic, stupid, sometimes violent, always unfaithful. He dumps her and the children in a wretched housing estate on the fringe of mining country, the bleakest of places and, though he occasionally returns, he is as incapable of helping Agnes as he is selfishly unwilling even to try to do so. Accordingly, when the daughter, Catherine, marries and leaves Scotland and Leek, the other son, a talented artist but deeply troubled, absents himself much of the time, the duty of care devolves to Shuggie, the small boy who fits in nowhere else.
The relationship between Agnes and Shuggie is beautifully, tenderly and understandingly done. Stuart doesn’t sentimentalise it and he hides nothing of the horrors of galloping alcoholism, but there is a gallantry about Agnes which commands respect and admiration, however reluctantly.
There are even moments of hope. Led to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, she takes the message and has a period of sobriety, ended, all too convincingly, when a current boyfriend (another taxi-driver) takes her out for a celebration dinner and tells her that, now that she’s cured, one little drink can do no harm. So it is over to Shuggie and his resourceful and loving efforts to care for Agnes and shield her from shame. In treating the bond between the mother and
the boy, Stuart writes with sympathy and with a tenderness that contrasts sharply with the brutality of much that he presents. It even seems appropriate that Shuggie, though reared in this coarse world, should speak with a certain delicate refinement, rather as Dickens has his boy heroes, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Pip, speak correct English, Oliver in Fagin’s kitchen, David in the bottle-factory and Pip at the Forge.
One would guess that though this novel took years to write, it had been maturing in Stuart’s memory and imagination even longer. There are of course echoes of other writers, but it is in no sense derivative. It’s a case of playing off and against the influence of others.
There is humour here too, of a dark dry sort, and it’s a novel that deserves, and will surely often get, a second reading.