LITERARY FICTION
SHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas Stuart (Picador £14.99, 448 pp)
SHUGGIE BAIN
by Douglas Stuart (Picador £14.99, 448 pp)
In truth, the young Shuggie Bain occupies less space in this doorstopper debut than his Ma, the magnificently rendered Agnes.
With her high heels, mink coat and stunning, porcelain-dentured smile, she could be a 1980s Glaswegian Liz Taylor, but the glamour is a sham. Having married an abusive, endlessly philandering taxi driver, she sinks her days into cans of Special Brew, leaving the sensitive Shuggie to fend for himself as he begins to intuit his homosexuality.
This is a panoramic portrait of both a family and a place, and Stuart steeps us fully in the grim decline of the Thatcher years: cheap booze, closed pits and lives lived on tick.
The rollercoaster misery of tragic Agnes’s alcoholism can be gruelling, and at more than 400 pages, this novel is longer than it needs to be. But it is also tender and unsentimental — a rare trick — and the Billy Elliot-ish character of Shuggie, when he does take the floor, leaps off the page.
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THE MISSION HOUSE
THE MISSION HOUSE by Carys Davies (Granta £12.99, 240 pp)
by Carys Davies (Granta £12.99, 240 pp)
The prize-winning Davies’s brilliantly crafted second novel begins with the arrival of sad-faced bachelor Hilary Byrd in a beautiful, Southern Indian hill town.
Resolutely unreligious, he’s nonetheless glad to move into the local mission house on the suggestion of its kindly Padre, and is soon unburdening himself to rickshaw driver Jamshed.
But Jamshed has his own concerns, such as helping his hairdresser nephew, Ravi, become an unlikely country and western star. And then there’s Priscilla, the Padre’s adoptive daughter, to whom Hilary is amazed to find himself drawn.
The scene is teasingly, charmingly set for a love triangle, but although Davies’s story initially seems timeless, it actually takes place in the years running up to Narendra Modi’s rise to power — years marked by outbreaks of horrific religious violence.
Having subtly prepared the ground, Davies finally springs the jaws of her plot, revealing, heartbreakingly, to us, and the tragically blinkered Hilary, what kind of story this really is.
BURNT SUGAR by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton £14.99, 240 pp)
BURNT SUGAR
by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton £14.99, 240 pp)
This caustic tale of a destructive mother-daughter bond is as potent as its title might suggest. Antara is a thirty-something artist living in Pune, India, whose work involves drawing the same face from memory day after day.
Meanwhile, her elderly mother’s cognitive powers are fast declining — but not so rapidly that she can’t attempt to drag her daughter down, too.
Gradually we learn about Antara’s miserable childhood in an ashram (where her mother abandoned her for a Mercedes-driving guru), and Antara’s eventual revenge.
Back in the present, as Antara obsessively polices her mother’s health, we wonder which of the two of them really has the problem.
Doshi’s visceral debut is a no-holds-barred excavation of how hate can both poison and sustain. It bristles with sharp, chilly aphorisms, but although this first-time author’s gifts are evident, it’s not exactly fun to read.
