The Resident Judge of Port Phillip

******SPOILER ALERT******

When Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize, I had heard of neither the book, nor the author. Having just completed The Shadow King, which was also shortlisted, I thought that the winner must have been an outstanding candidate to top Maaza Mengiste’s book. Now having finished the ultimate winner, I feel a little disappointed. It’s not that Shuggie Bain is not a good book: it is. It’s well written and will stick in your mind for some time after reading it. But it’s a little too much Angela’s Ashes for me (again- well-written and memorable but not Booker Prize material, not that it was eligible at the time), and I wonder if Stuart will be able to move beyond books steeped in his own experience. Time will tell, I suppose.

The book is a thinly disguised autobiography. Shuggie Bain is the youngest of three children, always fastidious and conscious of appearance. The woman whose appearance meant most to him was his mother, Agnes, whose attention to her dress, hair and makeup masked increasingly futile attempts to disguise her alcoholism. As the youngest and rather effeminate child, there was an intimacy between Shuggie and his mother as they slept and bathed together, and chose outfits together. Increasingly Shuggie became familiar (in a non-sexual way) with her body as he undressed her and put her to bed in yet another drunken stupor.

The book is set in a Glasgow ravaged by Thatcher’s economic policies. It is circular in its narrative, starting and finishing in a bedsit on the South Side (of Glasgow) in 1992, then backtracking to Sighthill 1981 where Shuggie is living in his maternal grandmother’s house with his parents Big Shug and Agnes. In 1982 Big Shug moves his wife, daughter Catherine and two sons Leek and Shuggie to Pithead, a former mining village that has been closed under Thatcher’s economic rationalism. He then promptly leaves the family. By 1989 Shuggie and his mother move to the East End, his older siblings having escaped the continuous degradation and betrayal caused by their mother’s drinking. By 1992, in the final section of the book, Agnes is no longer Shuggie’s burden.

And burden she is. She drinks through the Monday and Tuesday social security money as soon as she receives it. She breaks into the various meters attached to the utilities in a user-pays society to scrounge change. She goes out with men- too many men- and uses her body to get the money to drink. There is too much vomit and too many sprawled bodies. That one bright year when she finally breaks free of her addiction is even more tragic for how it ends. She is in no place or state to respond to her children’s needs. Near the end, when she has spent all the money and without a single bite of food in the house, she deflects Shuggie’s complaints of hunger by scoffing that at least he gets a free lunch at school. Not so. Shuggie is being bullied, and his lunch passes are extorted from him.

For Shuggie has his own needs and his own problems. Identified by everyone- his own family, neighbours, other students – as ‘not right’, he is struggling with his own sexuality. He would have stood out as a figure of fun. As a five-year-old, just moved into the Pithead house, he interrupts his mother as she is meeting the neighbours- a toxic scrabble of vicious women who congregate around the fence gossiping and bitching- to express his dissatisfaction with their new house.

The front door opened again, and Shuggie came out on to the top step. Without addressing the women he turned to his mother and put his hands on his hips; he trust a foot forward and said as clear as Agnes had ever heard him speak, “We need to talk. I really do not think I can live here. It smells like cabbages and batteries. It’s simply unpossible.” (p.101)

p.101

Despite his older brother Leek’s attempts to get him to walk in a more masculine way by ‘not being so swishy’ and making ‘room for your cock’ (p.152), Shuggie is a target and he suffers.

‘Social services’ is remarkably absent in this book. This is no surveillance state: instead it is a state of neglect. Would Shuggie have been better off, removed from his mother? No, I don’t think so. She is the centre of his world – too much- but his sense of obligation and persistence in keeping on hoping, keeping her sober, catching her beauty, lies at the core of his existence. Other people just drop away- his own siblings, his grandparents, his own father, her partner – none of them can withstand the selfishness and energy-draining repetition of Agnes’ drunkenness. An illness, yes, but one for which it is hard to have sympathy.

Why do I feel short-changed with this book as a Booker Prize winner? It is a long book at 430 pages, and it feels every bit of it without actually moving far (which is of course, a function of the stuck-ness of Agnes and her family). It tells a narrative well, its use of dialogue is good, the emotional tenor of Shuggie’s bond with his mother is nuanced, and Stuart imagines himself sensitively into Agnes’ befuddled mind. It is all of these things, but for me it didn’t have the literary heft that I would want a Booker Prize winner to have. It is, at heart, a misery memoir, self-contained within its own world. A worthy short-list contender, but for me not ‘winner’ material.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

When I started reading this book, I started feeling a bit panicky. Ethiopia in 1935?? I knew nothing about it and started furiously Googling Ethiopia/Italy 1935 (‘Duck Duck Go-ing’ doesn’t slip off the tongue quite as easily, in my feeble attempt to stand up to Google’s ubiquity). But then I thought: hold on, this is the author’s job, not mine – no Barthesian ‘death of the author’ for me- and so I sat back and let Mengiste take me where she wanted. I was right to trust her: she took me to a war that I was only vaguely aware of, to the men and the women who fought it, and to soldiers on both sides.

Hirut is a young girl who, after the death of her parents, has been taken as a servant into the household of Kidane, a friend of her parents, and his wife Aster. All that Hirut has left to remind her of her father was his old rifle, that he used during the first Italian-Abyssinian war in 1896. Although Aster had been forced into an unwilling marriage to Kidane, she is also jealous of her servant Hirut, and almost beats her to death. However, as Italy invades Ethiopia, Aster is determined to fight alongside the men, and she drags Hirut into the conflict as well. Hirut’s gun is confiscated and added to the meagre cache of the Ethiopian rebels. Kidane, who veers between kind and abusive towards Hirut, assumes the leadership of a group of rebels -both men and women- who harry the Italian troops.

Carlo Fucelli is the leader of those Italian troops. He is a sadistic man, particularly after his own masculinity is challenged, and realizing that he has leverage over Ettore Navarra, the Jewish Italian photographer amongst his troops, he forces the photographer to photograph the atrocities that he commits. Compliant but deeply uncomfortable, Navarra is feeling his own position becoming more precarious as the anti-Semitism in Europe increases, especially learning about his father’s own history, something previously unknown to him.

The ‘Shadow King’ of the title is a peasant with an uncanny likeness to the now-exiled Emperor Haile Selassie. While Selassie frets in Bath UK, his ‘shadow’ appears, almost like a vision, before the troops to inspire them. I wasn’t particularly convinced by this Shadow King character. He seemed rather implausible and unnecessary and by choosing the ‘The Shadow King’ as the title, the author gives him a prominence not found in the book itself.

There is a lot going on in this book. Told in the present tense, the point of view switches back and forth between characters, separated only by an icon. The text is interrupted by short incantations by the ‘Chorus’, evoking a Greek play. There are short descriptions headed ‘Photo’ which describe a photograph taken by Navarra, or his framing of a photograph that he will take.

All these diverse elements add to the breadth of the book. Even Fucelli, the butcher of the story, is explored with sensitivity, and Kidane is seen as both ally and monster. Navarra is conflicted: he is the photographer who has captured atrocity but he is also a son, in a world that is becoming increasingly dangerous. Women in this book are at the mercy of men, but they too can be violent.

The book is beautifully written, if a little overwrought at times. However, Mengiste was not served well by her proof-reader, who let several typos go through. Notwithstanding these glitches, I finished the book feeling as if I had been in the hands of a masterful, poetic writer, who had taken me to a theatre of war totally unknown to me. She has eschewed the male-dominated military narrative to see women as active fighters, and ultimately all actors as victims. I can see why this book was short-listed for the Booker. It makes me wonder how ‘Shuggie Bain’ bested it.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library. I have had it reserved for months!

SPOILER ALERT

I’m always a sucker for an American Civil War book, but I didn’t realize that this was going to be one until I started reading it. (I should have read the back of the book, where it is quite clear that this is set in 1850s America). I had been more attracted by the author, Sebastian Barry, whose A Long, Long Way and The Secret Scripture I had read before. Those two books were both set in Ireland, and I expected this to be the same.

It was only when I started reading that the memory floated back of a fellow postgraduate working on the Irish involvement in the American Civil War. Thomas McNulty, the main character in this book, is such a man: driven as a 17 year old from famine-struck Ireland, he joins the army to fight in the Indian Wars and there he befriends- indeed, more than befriends – falls in love- with his brother-in-arms John Cole. I certainly hadn’t expected that, and was brought up with a jolt when Barry comes out and says it: “And then we quietly f**ked and then we slept”.

Before joining the cavalry, and both destitute, Thomas and John work as ‘girls’ on the stage in a mining town starved for women, until they get too old and big to carry off the pretense. Needing work, they join the cavalry. Their platoon is charged with ‘clearing’ the land for white emigration, and they encounter the Oglala Sioux chief Caught-His-Horse-First first in an act of generosity, then betrayal. Discharged from the army, Thomas and John head for the midwest, taking with them Winona, the niece of Chief Caught-His-Horse-First, to form a make-shift and unusual family. They rejoin the theatre-circuit, and Thomas reprises his cross-dressing act. When the Civil War comes, they join up on the Union side. It is an ugly war, and its ugliness pursues them into their post-war life.

It’s strange: I was completely drawn into this book and finished it in an afternoon. Yet, when writing this post, I was left mainly with impressions and I confess to having to look up other reviews to remember the actual plot. The book as a whole made a stronger impact than the individual details.

In reading this book, there were flashes of Cold Mountain and unexpected echoes of Blood Meridian. There is certainly violence, but somehow it is dream-like and disconnected. The narrative voice in this book, speaking in the present tense throughout, in my head sounded to be a completely American accent, without even a trace of Irishness. It is, essentially, a love story, with beautiful descriptions of landscape and climate. I don’t often read a book with a film in mind, but I expect to see this on the screen one day, as it has a very filmic, epic quality.

My rating: 8

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library