It has been almost a month since I finished reading Shuggie Bain. I followed the last year’s Booker Prize Shortlist and attended a few online interviews and readings with the shortlisted authors. In the first wave I bought Brandon Taylor’s Real Life and enjoyed it, then followed Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body and Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (both, as yet, unread). I hesitated with Shuggie and only decided to buy it after it had won. I did find the premise interesting but, for some reason, not interesting enough. So, when I started reading it and struggled to engage with the story I was not too surprised.

Eighty pages in and I was telling everyone that I do not see the point. And then it hit... I am not sure what exactly was the turning point, I would not say either Shuggie or Agnes are easy characters to warm up to – Agnes’ alcoholism introduces a Jekyll & Hyde dichotomy while the emphasis on Shuggie’s ‘otherness’ creates an intrinsic separation. At the same time, they share an inescapable likeness - the importance of appearances, insistence on dressing well, their protective aloofness and their painful looking after each other. They are cut out of the same cloth, they even share a self-harming urge to cajole Shug back or at least prevent him from cutting the ties completely.

The shifting of the story from Shuggie to Agnes to Catherine to Leek and back to Shuggie & Agnes creates a circular panorama of a life of and with an alcoholic. It reflects on the abusive relationship between Agnes and Shug through Catherine’s escape into what will likely turn out to be a very similar marriage. Leek’s story, although bordered by his failure to act on the university acceptance, seems to offer some solace in the form of a seemingly stable and happy relationship with a baby on the way. It falls to Shuggie to fully redeem Agnes and her life, to extricate himself from the sticky web and spin his own. Even though his situation is bleak, we see him care for and be accepted and even loved by Leeann. He proves himself capable of looking after himself, navigating the world on his own with dignity, purpose and determination.

I was most affected by Agnes’ pain that did not seem to have an identifiable source, it seemed to have been inherent to her. And then there was her aloneness, she made crowds part in front of her, not allowing them to touch her. She grew thorns and spikes and secreted poison not only when drunk, it was her self-inflicted armour that she was too frightened and fragile to shed and thus she invited more hurt and pain. The story did not offer a starting point – a traumatic experience that would account for Agnes’ wound. One could speculate whether her father indulged her too much, whether her mother took out her pain of her lost baby out on her, whether the bleak prospects and general downtrodenness of the community proved too much to bear...

Agnes will definitely stay with me for a long time and that is a powerful achievement by Douglas Stuart.