Shuggie shuffled

Douglas Stuart’s second novel struggles to emerge from the shadow of his Booker Prize-winning debut.

PICADOR, £16.99 REVIEW BY STUART KELLY

Winning the Booker Prize for your debut work is not an automatic ticket to literary Elysium. It was many years before Arundhati Roy produced another novel after The God of Small Things, and even then it partook more of her polemics than her storytelling. DBC Pierre has written several novels after

Vernon God Little and most should come with a sticker saying “I can’t believe I’m getting away with this”. So what do we make of Douglas Stuart, with his first novel after

Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize? It is a rather problematic proposition.

Young Mungo is a form of self-plagiarism. One can tick off the common concerns: maternal alcoholism, sectarian violence, a burgeoning awareness of adolescent gay sexuality, poverty, rape, grooming, drugs, the poor quality of Glaswegian cuisine. It is as if the pack of cards marked “themes” has been reshuffled. Walter Scott wrote of Tobias Smollett that his second novel was “sedulously laboured into excellence”. Shuggie Bain did have a quality of seething pressure, and I feel Scott’s observation – exciting scrappiness versus immaculate polish – holds here.

Mungo Hamilton is the youngest of three. His older sister, Jodie, is a steely and sometimes dislikeable young woman, left in the lurch by their mother’s frequent booze-related absences. His older brother, Hamish, is eminently dislikeable, as the capo of a gang of Protestant thugs. It will come as no surprise whatsoever that Mungo is the one confused about his sexuality. The front cover shows two teenage boys kissing and the dust jacket gives away half the plot. But even without the paraphernalia of how the book is marketed, a subtle reader would guess from the opening pages, where Mungo is described as someone who “smiled when he didn’t want to. He would do anything