‘Some novels by Glasgow writas have had rave reviews in the Times Lit. Sup., but I’m afraid they leave me cold. Half seem to be written in phonetic Scotch about people with names like Auld Shug.’ A long time has passed since these dismissive remarks appeared in Alasdair Gray’s 1990 novel, Something Leather. Now books about people with names like Auld Shug win the Booker Prize and squeamishness about Scotch dialect sullying the pages of British fiction has long since dissipated after the global success of Trainspotting.

Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain is set in heartlands of former industrial Scotland, between Glasgow, the former world capital of locomotive manufacturing and shipbuilding, and Lanarkshire, which was historically Scotland’s largest coalfield. Stuart tells a known story of dislocation through the novel eyes of struggling alcoholic mother Agnes Bain, and her youngest son, Hugh, who is named after his abusive taxi driver father and known affectionately as ‘Shuggie’. As in Brian MacNeill’s song, there are no gods and precious few heroes in 1980s Clydeside. One chapter late in the novel brutally concludes, ‘the only thing you can save is yourself’.

Agnes has many enemies: her first suitable Catholic husband, Shug’s father, the men who use her for sex and most of all herself. By choosing to leave her first man, Agnes is at least partially responsible for the Bains’ miserable life in the Lanarkshire mining village of Pithead.

Shuggie grows up stunted by the trauma of both paternal and sibling abandonment as well as his mother’s inability to look after him. He becomes an easy target as a young effeminate boy with a posh voice at a Catholic school and is victimised by several male sexual abusers over the course of the novel. One of Stuart’s key achievements is in bringing a much-needed queer perspective to this historical moment, one that has almost exclusively been seen through a hyper-masculine lens.

Not that the story avoids reinforcing some of the clichés that riddle writing about the period. As Hugh drives a customer whose husband has recently been made redundant the reader learns that the ‘industrial days were over […] Men were losing their very masculinity’. This is one of the scant and hackneyed references to the motive forces behind growing impoverishment and atomisation. Longing for the old world is presented as ultimately hopelessly nostalgic and prettifying a blighted past.

There are sections of the novel that feel unreal in their brutality. One Hogmanay, a primary-school aged Shuggie takes a taxi into Glasgow from Pithead to locate his mother at a party, only to be sexually abused by an ostensibly empathetic driver. In the book’s key reflective passage, Shuggie concludes that his mother’s prime positive quality is her capacity to endure the pain that she is at least partly responsible for. This perhaps above all explains the novel’s appeal in contemporary Scotland. Shuggie is an archetypal example of the intergenerational transmission of trauma and dysfunctionality. The Bains both cry out for intervention and also reassuringly remind the reader that perhaps there is little that can be done for people like that.

Thatcher’s government might be present as some sort of distant evil, but Agnes’ real enemies are other down-and-outs like her and those that have the temerity to be socially mobile. After Agnes is hospitalised following a suicide attempt, and Hugh Senior takes Shuggie to his new family home, she launches a one-woman siege of her husband’s new abode. The reader is obliged to feel heartened as Agnes’ stiletto draws blood from the adulteress’ face following an inspired lob which is cheered on by local youths. Agnes’ death at the age of fifty-two leaves a teenage Shuggie distraught but somewhat liberated.

Before winning the Booker Prize, Shuggie Bain was endorsed by Scotland’s most prominent book critic, the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. This is in stark contrast to the reception of Scotland’s first Booker prize winner, James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late, which was decidedly much cooler. It divided the judges and one reviewer went as far as counting every use of the word ‘fuck’ to highlight the book’s vulgarity. In his defiant acceptance speech, Kelman asserted ‘that my culture and my language have the right to exist’ before ending with the pointed aside, ‘if any writers prefer to assimilate then why not, it is their right.’

In his post-award interview, Stuart proclaimed Kelman’s earlier prize winner ‘my bible.’ They share little other than the backdrop of working-class Glasgow. Stuart’s limpid prose is a chiselled third person lightly seasoned with some Glaswegian vernacular and occasional obscenity. The writing is at its most successful when it rearranges Shuggie’s environment into metaphoric material that renders his world both as claustrophobic and capacious.  Take a typical description: ‘the wind blew black wispy puffs from the tops like they were giant piles of unhoovered stour.’ As evocative as such imagery may be, the problem with a world that can only refer to itself is that it cannot point to another. The bold representational strategies innovated by Gray and other writers of the so-called second Scottish renaissance are jettisoned in favour of a syrupy, lyrical realism that preserves Shuggie’s immiserated society in literary aspic. It can only be escaped, never changed.

Douglas Stuart wrote this novel from New York, his home for the last two decades. It is a letter from America to the home city he had to leave behind in order to fulfil his aspirations, a familiar tale of Scottish emigration. This is reminiscent of the ‘kailyard school’ of fiction, a much-derided popular genre of novels in the late nineteenth century which traded in sentimental portrayals of Scottish rural life, given its name by the old Scottish word for cabbage patch. A new urban kailyard is animated by the spectacle of post-industrial decline rather than dewy-eyed depictions of Scotland’s pastoral past. The Booker Prize threatens to reinforce a limited understanding of a vibrant and diverse literary scene, where writers such as Jenni Fagan and Martin Macinnes are expanding the horizon of what constitutes Scottish literature beyond the bounds of performing authenticity.

In Kelman’s schema, it is clear that Stuart prefers to assimilate, giving people a bleak fetishized version of Glasgow, with all formal experimentation removed for easier consumption. We should ask why Scottish politicians and literary reviewers have so enthusiastically endorsed a work that perpetuates a grim, pacifying spectacle and holds us back from imagining a world in which Shuggie and his community’s suffering is not inevitable.