Maya Beiser, East of June, Siren Songs, Riley Green

 

 

The cello has long been a staple of drawing room music, but a lot of folks are letting it explore. Count Maya Beiser among them. She has been involved in 13 recording projects that vary so widely in style that the New Yorker simply labeled her “the reigning queen of the avant-garde cello.” Her “Cello, Woman, Bed, Camera TV” demonstrates why she defies pigeonholes. It’s classical, but also experimental, dramatic, sexy, bold, and a little bit goofy. What else are we to make of a composition attributed to Ludwig Van Badguy? Or listen to those dark notes in her take of David Bowie’s “Lazarus” as other musicians bounce passages “Eleanor Rigby”-like in the background. before she attacks her instrument like an enraptured rock guitarist. Well, damn, it would empty anyone’s tomb, and if you know what to label all of this, please get back to me. She’s done a cello opera on Bowie and if that doesn’t make her far enough removed from the mainstream, sample her cover of Bowie’s “Life on Mars.” Don’t let the pastoral opening fool you. You’ll hear a bit of everything on this, including what sounds like echoes of the “Star Wars” theme. Her 11-minute trippy multimedia investigation of “Blackstar” will convince you Beiser isn’t from this planet. Zowie Ziggy!

 

East of June is an expandable Los Angeles band whose core is bass player Dirk Lance (Incubus), guitarist Kyle Mortensen, and vocalist Emily Rath. They are an object lesson is why you shouldn’t make snap judgments. If you listen only to a song like “Little Bird” you might think sunny, California, pop band. But delve deeper into the band’s superb Website and try “Count on Me.” It is moody, Rath’s voice has an edge of desperation, and the song is more enigmatic than the title suggests. Rath has been compared to Stevie Nicks. You can make up your own mind about that, but Rath is dynamic to be sure. The Nicks comparisons are most obvious in two songs with a disco vibe: “Weight of My Sin” and “I Can’t Feel It.” The first flirts with darkness; the second is upbeat with splashes of old-time soul as filtered through a 21^st century dance club. If they haven’t impressed you with their 70s-laced eclecticism yet, they offer the catchy song “Rebel” in acoustic and full band versions.

 

There are two types of cover bands: Those who perform recognizable material, and those who perform little known material. Alas, Siren Songs falls mostly into the first category. Their nine-track debut album–also titled Siren Songs­– has just three original songs, six familiar songs, including “For Good,” from the Broadway musical “Wicked.” The last makes sense; Merideth Kaye Clark is half of the Oregon-based duo and she’s mostly done theatre work. Her presence also explains why we also hear the Rogers and Hammerstein chestnut “Edelweiss.” Clark and musical partner Jean Grinels sing like angels, but aren’t heavenly enough to make us forget Bonnie Raitt’s cover of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.” I also wonder why on heaven or on earth a debut recording invites comparison to Dolly Parton (“Jolene”), Cyndi Lauper (“Time After Time”), or Joni Mitchell (“Chelsea Morning”)? These are songs one inserts into concert set lists as lagniappes. Grinels penned the three originals. “Goodnight Sun, Hello Moon” is a love song with sweet harmonies, “100” spotlights attention-grabbing patter changes, and “Gray” has some blues tucked in around the edges. These three suggest Siren Songs should have worked out more original material before entering the studio.

 

I heard several Riley Green songs and came away knowing that he really likes trucks, beer, hunting, Dixie, and misses his grandpa. And, though his single “There Was a Girl” is catchy, the label is problematic. T’is a shame, because the dude can sing and his arrangements really grab you. I have no idea of his politics, but his songs have too much thematic similarity and his good ole’ boy from Alabama take on country music comes off as more outmoded than outlaw.

 

Rob Weir

Leave the World Behind Unsettling and Dynamic

Leave the World Behind (2020)

By Rumaan Alam

Ecco Press, 256 pages.

★★★★★

 

If something undefined but ominous occurred, where would you wish to be? Most people would probably say “home,” and in a roundabout way that’s what Leave the World Behind is about.

 

The novel begins innocently, if annoyingly. We meet a white family headed by Amanda, an advertising maven, and Clay, an English and media studies professor at City University of New York. They have two children, lank 16-year-old Archie and spoiled, slightly chubby Rose, who is 13. Like many bourgeois Brooklynites, the family is comfortable, but they focus more on what they don’t have. This is especially true of Amanda who, to be charitable, is hard to stomach.

 

Summer vacation is an Airbnb rental in the Hamptons (Long Island) that underscores that they are not among the super elites. The sprawling home is tucked into a wooded glade near the ocean and sports granite counters, top-quality furnishings, a hot tub, and a swimming pool. Amanda spends a small fortune on more fancy food than can possibly be consumed in a week, while simultaneously feeling self-important, put upon, and covetous.

 

The family is settling in and enjoying themselves, though odd things startle them. A huge herd of deer appears at the edge of the forest, the sky crackles, and a loud boom is heard. Even worse, their devices stopped working. They are the sort who are so tied to them that they can’t find their way into the town five miles away without GPS.

 

It’s about to get worse. In the middle of the night, there’s a knock at the door and a frazzled and terrified elderly black couple stands outside. They introduce themselves as a George and Ruth Washington, who own the home. As George explains, something weird is happening and they fled New York because they felt a deep impulse to be in their country home rather than in their Park Avenue apartment. George opens his wallet and offers $1000 cash if they can just stay in the house as well.

 

If you imagine this is a race drama you are correct, but only a few yards down the country lane. As it transpires, something might be seriously wrong, but to quote an old Buffalo Springfield song, what it is ain’t exactly clear. There is a disconcerting hum in the air, more booms, and more unnatural phenomena occur. Animals stir, but people are mostly ensconced in their homes or absent.

 

Imagine being cooped up with strangers. Imagine not having the faintest idea what’s going on. There is no Internet, no TV, no radio, and no newspapers. Electricity still works, but New York City is rumored to be completely dark. Is it a hurricane? A blackout? An attack? The Rapture? Concrete and glass crack. Terror mounts, but at what can it be focused? What if everything you think matters–careers, investments, possessions, money – suddenly mean nothing? How to explain unusual sicknesses – Archie vomits, several of his teeth fall out, and then he feels fine – or things that shouldn’t be, like a flock of flamingos on a Long Island lawn? Where would you turn if, “You demanded answers, but the universe refused?” Alam writes, “Some people started to realize that they had a naïve belief in the system. Some people tried to maintain that system. Some people were vindicated that they had stockpiled guns and those filter straws that made water safe to drink.” Which one is you and how would you reconcile it when, “However much happened, so much more would happen?”

 

Leave the World Behind is the spellbinding and unsettling novel that is worthy of its National Book Award nomination. Think of it as a cross between Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and On the Beach. When things seem to be falling apart, Ruth understands “that … everything [is] held together by tacit agreement that it would…. There was no real structure to prevent chaos, there was only a collective faith in order.” Is her faith misplaced? This page turner will leave you trembling. It would be wrong of me to say if you should be!

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

The Bass Rock Has Rocky Parts

The Bass Rock  (2020)

By Evie Wyld

Knopf Doubleday, 368 pages.

★★★

 

The Bass Rock is a saga set in North Berwick, Scotland. It cycles between three different time periods and emphasizes the violence, psychological and physical, inflicted upon women. Bass Rock, which sits in the Firth of Forth, is a silent witness to tragedies. Author Evie Wyld labels each new chapter I, II, or III, but they are not sequential. This makes for rough going until readers sort characters and relationships.

 

III is actually the oldest of the stories and is probably set during Scotland’s persecution of suspected witches, probably in the 18^th century. It involves a red-haired girl – a defining characteristic of main characters in the book – about to be killed for suspected witchcraft, until the town’s ex-minister takes her into his household. Sarah’s entire family is dead, including a sister who was raped and murdered. The minister’s decision was not a popular one and his household flees from local wrath, though Sarah does not escape tragedy.

 

Chapters marked II are the best developed and involve a World War II widower, Peter, whose new wife Ruth is English. She finds herself uprooted to a big house in North Berwick, where she serves as a surrogate mother to Peter’s sons, Michael and Christopher. She tries to fit in, but she doesn’t know the lay of the cultural landscape and is viewed with suspicion by the minister and most of the local women. Peter mourns his dead sister more than he cares about Ruth, drinks too much, expects her to be a dutiful housewife, and has secrets. He is, in short, a jerk. Only the maid Betty, who seeks a safe haven for her niece Bernadette, gives Ruth the time of day. To top it off, the house seems to be haunted.

 

Chapters marked I are set in the present and center upon Vivian, the daughter of Michael and Bernadette. “Viv” is a mess on many levels. She has rotten luck in relationships, has a tense relationship with her sister Katherine, has low self-esteem, and has a penchant for attracting oddballs. When she agrees to housesit the North Berwick home for her uncle Christopher, she runs into Maggie, a local self-proclaimed witch and occasional sex worker. Both detect a presence in the house.

 

The novel’s female bondings – Sarah and her dead sister Agnes; Ruth and Betty, Betty and her sister Mary; Vivian and Katherine, and Vivian and Maggie – parallel each other. Bass Rock is a character in its own right. It is a constant in the flow of time, and the witness to atrocities perpetrated upon women. Its silence befits a barren lump a mile from shore that has served as a monastery, prison, lighthouse, and setting for numerous novelists, including Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s also the roosting place of 150,000 gannets, which makes it ghostly white in appearance.

 

Perhaps Bass Rock is also Wyld’s second ghost. Viv speculates, 

 

                        I wonder, if this ghost everyone sees, is in fact 100,000 different ghosts? It’s only possible to focus on one at a time. They spill out of the doorway…. They fill the house top to bottom, they are locked in wardrobes, they are under the floorboards…. The birds on Bass Rock, they fill it, they are replaced by more…. They nest on the bones of the dead.

 

We wonder also what Maggie sees as she stares out to sea and remarks,

 

What would it take? What if all the women that have been killed by men through history were visible to us, all at once? If we could see them lying there. What if you could project a hologram of the bodies in the place they were killed?

 

The Bass Rock will not be everyone’s cup of herbs. Wyld doesn’t paint all women as victims and all men as potential rapists, but it’s not too far off the track. Each woman in the book deals with male-inflicted grief in some form and each wrestle with a combination of male subjugation and bad decision-making.

 

Wyld leaves herself open to having written an misandrous novel. To quote Maggie again, “The reason men want women is to fuck them…. And sometimes … they kill them because they weren’t allowed to fuck them and don’t want to get into trouble.”

Many men have been drunken, philandering, violent thugs whose personal validation is tied to processing women. Too many, but by no means most. What does it tell us when the only kind man in the novel is gay? This novel has been enormously popular, so clearly it strikes a resonant chord. But a rant is not necessarily truth.

 

Wyld’s unorthodox organization is also problematic. I applaud her desire to dispense with conventional structure, but it might have worked better in this case. Sarah’s story is detectably incomplete. Wyld needs a ghost, but it would have been better to give us one at the outset and move on. It is also detectable that Ruth’s story is so well drawn that the others pale by comparison. At the risk of being dismissed as a discomforted male reviewer, I view The Bass Rock as an incompletely realized effort.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

January 2021 Album of the Month: Karen Matheson

 

Karen Matheson

Still Time

Compass Records

 

It’s hard to believe, but Capercaillie vocalist Karen Matheson is on the cusp of her 58^th birthday. Her voice has dropped a bit over the years, but it’s still a glorious instrument. In addition to her work with the band, Matheson also drops the occasional album that spotlights her voice; Still Time is her 5^th solo album.

 

Of course, when you’ve been performing since high school, front a celebrated band, have recorded with scores of others, and possess an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for your contributions to the arts, the term “solo” just means collections of material chosen by the artist. Still Time is packed with band members and longtime friends, including her husband Donald Shaw (accordion, keyboards), Ewen Vernal (bass), John Doyle, Sorren MacLean (guitars, vocals), and others. Call Scottish songwriter and fretted artist James Grant a co-conspirator, though, as he penned four of the album’s 11 songs. This includes the album’s single “Cassiopeia Coming Through,” which is arranged with the jazz-influenced folk ornaments that’s long been a Capercaillie trait. The song’s blue notes resonate to moody effect courtesy of Ryan Quigley’s flugel horn, but mostly it’s Matheson’s calming tones that carry the piece. In this case, the lyrics owe more to yearnings beneath the magnificent nighttime constellation than to the vain Greek beauty whose name it bears.

 

“The Glory Demon,” a self-descriptive antiwar composition, is another terrific Grant song. Matheson spins it as a quasi-lullaby, though bass, percussion, and electric guitar disrupt our peacefulness, which is precisely the point. It is one of several songs that throw curves. Another is “Orphan Girl,” which lulls us to a tender place, though it’s about a parentless lassie about to be shipped from starving Ireland to Australia–if she passes inspection. Shaw’s tasteful piano, Rudi Di Groot’s cello, and Matheson’s emotion-laden voice throw us off balance. Is this a sad song? Tragic? Hopeful? A cover of Si Kahn’s famed “The Aragon Mill” parallels it. On one hand, the mill has closed and jobs have disappeared; on the other, textile work is arduous, dirty, and poorly compensated.

 

Most of the songs on Still Time are down tempo. Objectively speaking, the record could use more changes of pace. It’s not until track five that we get Shaw’s arrangement of “This Diamond Ring,” the most Celtic-flavored song on the album, though one with some Appalachian flair, with Shaw’s accordion jousting with Hannah Fisher’s lively fiddle and Dirk Powell’s banjo. North Americans will likely find the tune evocative of “Shady Grove,” though it too is actually an older tune. Matheson gives a slowed down cover of “Recovery,” a Runrig song, its folk styling enhanced by Matheson’s precise cadences and Michael McGoldrick’s whistles. It and her version of Robbie Burns’ “Lassie wi' the Lint White Hair” are simply drop-dead gorgeous. (Note: Concert clips have different personnel.)

 

In many ways, though, Shaw’s Still Time defines the album. The recording was done during the current coronavirus lockdown. How many of us feel as if 2020 was a calendar page ripped out of our lives? “Still Time” is soaked in the ambience of a late-night club where jazz and folk musicians have sat down to find common ground. Shaw’s keys tinkle softly, Fraser Fifield’s sax blows forlorn notes, and Matheson gently catalogs all the things that will happen: If you’re still here when the morning comes around…. 

 

Rob Weir

The Searcher Another Superb Tana French Mystery

The Searcher (20200

By Tana French

Viking, 464 pages.

★★★★

 

 

Irish mystery writer Tana French has a devoted following and yours truly is a long-time member of the pack. Unlike most within her genre, French doesn’t have a go-to detective, thus most of her novels treat us to a new cast of characters. Few can rival her when it comes to building new settings into which she places them. The Searcher was partially inspired by American Westerns, hence French’s decision to set the action in the West–of Ireland. Her village, Ardnakelty, is fictional, but internal clues suggest it’s near the coast, perhaps in County Clare. It’s a stunningly beautiful place, but also a hard and wild land.

 

Most French novels move at a crisp clip. The Searcher is a departure in that its main character, Cal Hooper, is trying to slow the pace of his life. He is a recently retired Chicago cop attempting to build life anew by moving to an Irish village, restoring a small cottage, and settling into rural life. Locals can’t imagine that a big city Yank actually wants to live in their village and most assume he’s either secretly working with the Garda (police) on a big case or renovating the abandoned cottage as a rental for summer tourists. Actually, Cal is a classic burn-out case fed up with violent crime, corrupt cops, and drug-infested neighborhoods. He’s also divorced and has a grown daughter, Alyssa, who lives in Seattle. Cal telephones her regularly, though there is tension between them.

 

Cal’s first mistake was assuming that a remote Irish village would somehow be immune from the problems he left behind. The second was imagining he could simply ease his way into the rhythms of Irish life. That’s hard to do when you’re tall, single, and your very attempt to keep to yourself makes you a curiosity object. Not that anyone with a neighbor like Mart can expect ‘round the clock peace. Mart has a dog named Kojak, a sweet tooth that Cal feeds every time he goes to Noreen Dunne’s store, and he’s Cal’s entrée into the local pub. Mart’s also a bachelor, though he doesn’t approve of such a life for Cal and is keen to match him with Noreen’s divorced sister Lena. But the biggest irritant in Cal’s life is his suspicion he’s being spied upon.

 

He’s not wrong about that; he catches a kid named Trey Reddy red handed. Trey comes from a dirt-poor home with too many kids headed by a single mum. Soon Trey and Cal form an odd bond of sorts. In exchange for some free labor, Trey can hang around, learn things from Cal, and get fed. What Trey really wants, though, is for Cal to find older brother Brendan, who disappeared. Trey is so persistent that Cal agrees to make queries.

 

If The Searcher has a moral, it’s don’t mess around in things you don’t understand using methods that don’t immigrate. Cal’s Chicago-style investigations are not nearly as clever or as effective as he imagined. My only real criticism of the novel is that Cal’s questioning techniques were too ham-handed to be believable. As anyone who has lived in a small place can tell you, you are seriously deluded if you think you can keep secrets or ask questions without word getting around. They’d probably also tell you that drugs, gangs, and shady characters are not just big-city problems. And they’d surely tell you that no one takes kindly to being considered a yokel.  

 

The worlds of Cal, Trey, Lena, and Lena will attract, collide, clash, and resolve, though resolution comes in messy and open-ended ways. This is the first French novel not written with a first-person narrator, as she wanted to focus on Cal the stranger via his relationship with and impact upon others. In this way, Cal is analogous to Wild West movie loners who drift into a new town cloaked in mystery. Will Cal stay or, like the title character in Shane, ride off in the sunset?

 

The Searcher takes time to develop, but its slow traipse across moors, hills, and bogs heightens our sense of Cal adrift. He is a man looking answers about Brendan, but also seeking life-affirming footholds.

 

Rob Weir

White Heat a Sizzling James Cagney Gangster Film

 

White Heat (1949)

Directed by Raoul Walsh

Warner Brothers, 114 minutes, not-rated (gangster violence)

★★★★★

 

Cody Loves Ma More than He Loves Virginia Mayo

 

2020 was a bizarre year, so this December, while many Americans were busy with tinsel and colored lights, we went on a film noir binge. Others were singing “White Christmas;” we watched White Heat. I’d say we got the better end of the stick. The American Film Institute ranked White Heat the fourth best gangster film of all-time. Such lists are always contentious, but it’s hard to imagine that anyone would dispute that it deserves to rank high.

 

First, a little background. It stars James Cagney, which seems like a natural–except that in 1949, many considered him a has-been. He was 50-years-old, which was (and is) ancient by Hollywood standards, and his previous four pictures were turkeys that flopped with little notice. Cagney was sick of gangster films and Jack Warner’s greatest desire was that Cagney never again appear in a Warner Brothers picture. Nonetheless, writers Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts thought he’d be good in the lead role of Arthur “Cody” Jarrett and convinced Warner to yield. He did and then contracted with the legendary Raoul Walsh to direct the film. The result is why one should never say “never.”

 

Cagney is riveting as an amoral sociopath. From the opening scene wherein he kills four people on a train to the very end, Cagney’s Cody makes Donald Trump look like Mother Theresa. His performance presaged characters in films such as Psycho, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Usual Suspects. Cody is married to Verna (Virginia Mayo) and has a gang, but the only person he cares about is his mother (Margaret Wycherly). He tops the most-wanted list but, when not suffering crippling migraines, Cody outsmarts his pursuers, including a unique way to avoid a murder rap. Just as investigators think they have the goods on him, he pleads guilty to an Illinois robbery that occurred at the same time. You can’t be in California and Illinois at the same time, right? Cody is willing to pull a few years hard time; it beats the gas chamber.

 

Hank Fallon (Edmond O’Brien) has a job few would rush to take. As a trusted Treasury Department underground investigator, he is assigned to pose as an inmate in the same Illinois penitentiary as Jarrett to collect intelligence and ingratiate himself into Cody’s gang. Cody has plenty of incentive to return to his sanguinary ways after prison. An underling, Big Ed Somers (Steve Cochran), has deposed Cody, taken up with Verna, and tried to engineer his assassination inside the Big House. And Cody goes absolutely psycho when he learns his mother is dead, possibly by Big Ed’s hand.

 

White Heat plays out as a rampage film whose open questions concern Big Ed, Verna, and Hank’s efforts to maintain his disguise before Cody gets wise. The film’s denouement inside a chemical refinery is everything a noir film should be: full of dizzying perspectives, shadows, skewed angles, tension, and surprises. Walsh filmed White Heat in semi-documentary style. That choice, plus Sidney Hickox’s creative cinematography, lend an air of verisimilitude that’s particularly obvious in the prison material and in the film’s closing moments. White Heat’s final scene has been rightly hailed as one of the era’s most impactful. I shall merely observe that Cagney is involved in one of film’s most dramatic exits.

 

I was surprised to learn that Cagney was not nominated for Best Actor for White Heat. He had worthy competition, but who today remembers Richard Todd in The Hasty Heart or Gregory Peck in the overwrought Twelve O’clock High? O’Brien’s performance also warranted an Oscar nod, but he too was overlooked. Mayo is suitably duplicitous, but the most fascinating woman on screen is Margaret Wycherly. You can definitely detect her impact on Estelle Parsons’ take on Blanche Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde.

 

As is always the case with older movies, one must take into account that the values of the past were not those of today. Mayo’s two-bit double-crosser falls into that category. In today’s crime films, there is hell to pay if the female lead isn’t at least a co-conspirator, but Mayo is a stock figure of Hollywood’s Golden Age: a femme fatale who makes bad things happen to others. You need not condone such roles, but you should not expect to see your version of political correctness on the screen.

 

You can deflect your discomfort by watching a different take on the Trojan horse legend. There is also great amusement in experiencing high-tech 1949-style, as police track Cody via a vintage directional finder while triangulating with a protractor and ruler. By any measure, though, White Heat still sizzles.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Shuggie Pain is Shattering and Brilliant

Shuggie Bain (2020)

By Douglas Stuart

Grove Press, 448 pages.

★★★★★

 

 

 

I thought Bobby March Will Live Forever was grim. Then I read Shuggie Bain. Richard Russo said, “Shuggie Bain will knock you sideways,” and he wasn’t wrong. Douglas Stuart won the 2020 Man Booker Prize, a remarkable achievement for a debut novel, but as it should be for an extraordinary novel.

 

In some ways, it could be considered a differently authored sequel to Alan Parks’ Bobby March. Both are set in Glasgow, but 20 years apart. Shuggie Bain takes us into the 1980s as Thatcherism hollowed out the Clyde Valley by eliminating jobs in the shipyards and mines. Shuggie—a nickname for Hugh—is born into an Irish-Scottish working-class family already on the skids. Both Shug (Shuggie’s father) and Shuggie’s mother, Agnes, had previous partners. Dissolving a union among Roman Catholics was fraught with extra trauma, given the church’s stance against birth control. Shug walked out on four bairns (children) and Shuggie’s older siblings, Catherine and “Leek” (Alexander) were sired by Agnes’ ex-husband, Brendan McGowan.

 

Shug drives a cab and combines business with backseat liaisons, even though everyone agrees that Agnes looks like young Elizabeth Taylor. Shug, Agnes, and her three children live in Sighthill, a Glasgow complex of down-market high-rise apartment blocks, with Agnes’ parents. Agnes splurges on clothing and cosmetics, but theirs is a hand-to-mouth existence in which its cheaper to have one’s teeth pulled and wear dentures than to see a dentist on a regular basis. Catherine escapes through marriage to a cousin and moves to South Africa, but Leek, who draws expertly, harbors no illusions he can afford art college. As the youngest, Shuggie is a mama’s boy whose effeminate ways make him the target of bullies old and young. Agnes dreams of living in a proper home with a yard and neighbors.

 

Be careful what you ask for. One day, Shug loads Agnes, Leek, and Shuggie into his cab and drives them to their new home in the Pithead section in the northeast outskirts of Glasgow. Then he drives away, as he has taken up with another woman who has six kids. As the name suggests, Pithead was once a thriving colliery. Not any longer. The mines are closed, most of the men are idle, and the landscape is marked by dirt streets, slag heaps, peatbogs, and abandoned buildings into which youths risk beatings from guards as they strip wire from cables to sell. Agnes tries hard to make a go of things, but she gets off on the wrong foot because her neighbors think she’s stuck-up. (She is!) Bridie Donnelly sizes her up as a problem drinker and she’s only wrong by being premature.

 

Shuggie Bain becomes a tale of alcoholism, cigarettes, grease, grit, and battles over turf no one really wants in the first place. As children of alcoholics know, a drinker will do whatever they must to get booze. You can imagine the lengths to which an attractive woman like Agnes might go, but you’ll come up short. You might also speculate what it’s like for a delicate child such as Shuggie, the book’s tragic hero. Again, you’ll be off the mark. Shuggie remains loyal to his mum and that might not be the best thing either. His only real friend is Leanne Kelly, who also has an alcoholic mother, but she’s not exactly a lean-on-me pal.

 

Shuggie Bain takes us through to 1992, when Shuggie is 17, and starting to figure some things out, but Stuart doesn’t tie things up in neat bows. He also leaves hanging the question of ethnicity. We infer that being of Irish stock matters, but to what degree? Despite close proximity and historical patterns of migration, today less than one percent of Scots claim an Irish background. Religion is similarly configured. Highlanders were once Catholic, but that’s the faith of choice for just 16 percent of present-day Scots. How do we explain the plight of the Bains? Ethnic discrimination? Religious bigotry? Substance abuse? Poverty? Stuart leaves such questions open for reader interpretation. The only thing we know for certain is that it was very difficult for women in the 1980s.

 

Shuggie Bain is a shattering novel. It’s also provocative, brilliant, and will indeed knock you sideways. Douglas Stuart’s Glasgow of the 1980s is where dreams died hard and hope struggled to blossom.

 

Rob Weir