56 The New York Review
‘A Good Year Once’
James Walton
Shuggie Bain
by Douglas Stuart.
Grove, 430 pp., $27.00
In 1896, six years before creating Peter
Pan, the Scottish writer J.M. Bar-
rie published a memoir of his mother
called, as she was, Margaret Ogilvy.
Its prevailing tone is set in the open-
ing chapter. “When you looked into
my mother’s eyes,” Barrie writes, “you
knew, as if He had told you, why God
sent her into the world—it was to open
the minds of all who looked to beau-
tiful thoughts.” The way Barrie tells
it, his mother began each day “by the
fireside with the New Testament in her
hands.” The rest of it she spent cheer-
fully performing domestic tasks, and
enjoying the works of George Eliot and
Thomas Carlyle.
In his encyclopedic Scotland’s
Books: The Penguin History of Scottish
Literature, Robert Crawford declares
Margaret Ogilvy “the only book- length
account of a mother by a male Scot-
tish writer.” But that was in 2007. Now,
with Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart’s
avowedly autobiographical first novel,
Barrie has some competition at last.
The contrast between the two books,
though, couldn’t be starker—because
this time, we’re faced with a mother
whose day is more likely to begin with
a blinding hangover, a spot of dry heav-
ing, and an urgent quest for any drink
still lying around. Should this quest
fail—and it often does—she generally
pops to the liquor store for twelve cans
of Special Brew, a high- strength lager
niche- marketed to alcoholics. Alterna-
tively, if she’s short of cash—and she
often is—she might swap sexual favors
for booze with a local husband or two,
leaving her young son Shuggie to fend
for himself. Or to fend for her, by col-
lecting her welfare money so she can
temporarily top up her lager supplies.
At no point does she read either Eliot
or Carlyle.
But this contrast isn’t just striking
in itself. It also has much to say about
the trajectory of Scottish writing over
the past century or so, from the whole-
someness of what’s known as the “Kail-
yard” movement to the grittier, more
booze- fueled and all- round bleaker
works that now predominate.
During its wildly popular late-
nineteenth- century pomp, Kailyard
literature (so- named for a cabbage
patch) was characterized by sentimen-
tal depictions of rural Scottish folk in
all their close- knit charm. The local
authority figures—such as doctors,
clergy men, and, above all, school-
masters (known as dominies)—were
touchingly benevolent. And while
some of the younger villagers might oc-
casionally prove unwise enough to let
their heads be turned by thoughts of a
more exciting life elsewhere, they soon
learned the error of their ways.
An archetypal example was Ian Mac-
laren’s best- selling 1894 collection of
tales, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush,
which came complete with a dominie
who “gave all his love to the children,
and nearly all his money too, helping
lads to college, and affording an inex-
haustible store of peppermints for the
little ones.” This was also the book
that gave the movement its name—
although not in a way that Maclaren
would necessarily have liked. The epi-
graph—“There grows a bonnie brier
bush in our kail- yard”—inspired the
Oxford- educated Edinburgh critic
J. H. Millar to coin the term Kailyard
in 1895 as a pejorative description of
what he regarded as phony, over- fond
portraits of an impeccably bonnie
Scotland, often by writers—Maclaren
and Barrie included—who didn’t live
there anymore.^1Millar’s use of the term—together
with his scorn—quickly caught on.Later the same year, the Glasgow
Herald ran a satirical interview with
a fictional Kailyard author (long resi-
dent in London) named Saunders Mc-
Whannel. According to Mc Whannel,
his chosen genre wasthe brawest and easiest way o’
makin’ siller [money] that you are
ever likely to come across... I just
keep blethering awa’ aboot a’ the
things that happened lang syne in
Drumwhinnie... and dress them
up to hit the ideas o’ the Cockney
public.As for his uncompromising use of
Scottish dialect—authentic or other-
wise—“The mair unintelligible it is the
better they’re pleased.”
Yet, as the critics chortled, the public
continued to buy these books in large
numbers—and not only in Scotland
and England. Maclaren died in 1907
during his third lecture tour of Amer-
ica. His Canadian fans included L. M.
Montgomery, herself of Scottish heri-
tage, who found Maclaren’s 1896 novel
Kate Carnegie a “delightful” reminder
of her own childhood; she was reading
it about the time she wrote Anne of
Green Gables (1908).
But by then the anti- Kailyard back-
lash from other Scottish writers wasalready underway. It was led—fero-
ciously—by George Douglas Brown,
whose The House with the Green Shut-
ters (1901) was written, as Brown said,
with “the sentimental slop of Barrie...
and Maclaren” firmly in its crosshairs.
“No one pictures the real Scottish vil-
lage life,” he told a friend. “I will write
a novel and tell you all what Scottish
village life is like.”
The result owes an obvious debt to
Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Cas-
terbridge. At the start of Brown’s novel,
John Gourlay—violent domestic tyrant
and proud possessor of both the epon-
ymous house and a terrifying glower—controls all trade in the fictional village
of Barbie. But then along comes the
more modern James Wilson, who takes
some delight in destroying Gourlay’s
business.
Yet even Hardy might have consid-
ered what happens next a little on the
gloomy side. John Jr., his father’s last
hope of social and financial recovery,
returns from Edinburgh University
a fully fledged alcoholic, who, after
years of paternal oppression, finally
stands up to his domineering old dad
by smashing his head in with a poker.
Unfortunately, John Sr. continues to
glower from beyond the grave, leading
a terrified John Jr. to commit suicide.
His stricken mother and sister—by this
stage both suffering from terminal ill-
nesses—then kill themselves too.
And just in case we miss his anti-
Kailyard point, Brown regularly serves
up unflattering analyses of “the Scots
character,” with its tendency to “an
envious belittlement” of anybody who
considers themselves a cut above their
neighbors. Hence the “fine cackling in
Barbie” as John Sr.’s business fails and
the gleeful gossip about John Jr.’s alco-
holism. There’s also tension between
these solid Protestants and the Irish
Catholics arriving in the area: “Scot-
land’s not what it used to be! It’s owre-
run wi’ the dirty Eerish!”
Robert Crawford understatedly ar-
gues that Brown’s novel “marked a di-
rection for future Scottish fiction.” And
The Edinburgh History of Scottish Lit-
erature Volume 3 (2007) refers to the
work of Irvine Welsh, such as 1993’s
Trainspotting—with its famously lurid
scenes of drug- taking, violence, vomit-
ing, and double incontinence—as “theculmination of a movement in Scottish
writing dating back to...The House
with the Green Shutters.”
The Kailyard/anti- Kailyard division
is also central to the book voted Scot-
land’s favorite Scottish novel in a 2016
BBC poll: Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sun-
set Song (1932).^2 After introducing us
to the fictional village of Kinraddie,
Gibbon clarifies its literary—rather
than geographical—location by saying
that it was “fathered between a kail-
yard and a bonny brier bush in the lee
of a house with green shutters.” The
book that follows duly reflects both
the Kailyard affection for Scotland
and the anti- Kailyard disgust, mixing
scenes of communal kindliness with
plenty of drink, domestic violence, re-
ligious sectarianism, and envious belit-
tlement. The same double perspective
is also shared by the novel’s heroine,
Chris Guthrie. Throughout the book,
she feels there aretwo Chrisses... that fought for
her heart and tormented her. You
hated the land and the coarse
speak of the folk... one day; and
the next... almost you’d cry for...
the beauty... and sweetness of the
Scottish land and skies.But the idea of a divided self in
Scottish writing goes back a lot fur-
ther than the Kailyard debate. In Scot-
land’s Books, Crawford traces it to the
eighteenth- century philosopher David
Hume, a leading figure in the Scottish
Enlightenment, who saw the self as
“in a perpetual flux.” (“Generations
of critics have detected dramatically
divided selves in Scottish fiction: those
selves are Hume’s children,” Crawford
ringingly asserts.) Either way, it’s cer-
tainly there in the murderous Calvinist
narrator of James Hogg’s The Private
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified
Sinner (1824)—voted number 10 in
that same BBC poll; in (of course) The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson, who
later explained that Hogg’s book “has
always haunted and puzzled me”; and
even in the inspirational and/or fascist
main character of The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel.
(In a 1962 essay, Spark explained that
much of her work was based on the sim-
ple word “nevertheless.”)
By 1919 the idea of the double self in
Scottish writing was sufficiently estab-
lished to gain its own label when Pro-
fessor G. Gregory Smith came up with
the less- than- catchy “Caledonian anti-
syzygy.” Decades later, Irvine Welsh
put it more bluntly: “All that duality
stuff,” he said, “it’s a massive theme in
Scottish literature.”It is, then, a testament to Douglas
Stuart’s talent that all this literary his-
tory—along with the tough portraits
of Glaswegian working- class life from
William McIlvanney, James Kelman,
Alasdair Gray, and Agnes Owens—
can be felt in Shuggie Bain without ei-Raymond^Depardon/MagnumPhotosGlasgow, 1980(^1) While Millar acknowledged Barrie’s
superiority to his paler imitators such
as Maclaren, he also wrote that, thanks
to books like Auld Licht Idylls (1888)
and A Widow in Thrums (1889), Barrie
was “fairly entitled to look upon him-
self as pars magna, if not pars maxima,
of the Great Kailyard Movement.”
(^2) For Scotland’s first minister, Nicola
Sturgeon, Sunset Song is “without a
shadow of doubt, my favourite book of
all time.”