Douglas Stuart in conversation with Colm Tóibín

this is column treben and i'm at court festival happening between the 21st and 25th of april and i'm here to interview douglas stewart about his novel chuggy bane douglas hi hello um let's start at the beginning of this could you describe to me when you first thought of the book and then how that thinking made its way first into the writing of the early sentences of the book oh yeah that's a big question it's uh i actually sat down to begin writing shaggy in 2008 and at first it wasn't necessarily a conscious thought i wasn't i wouldn't give myself any lofty goals such as i'm going to write a novel i sat down really to write scenes as they came to me as i saw them and as i felt them and the first words i actually wrote actually came from chapter 13 of the two brothers going across the sea of slag and scrapping for copper because i could see the scene in my mind and it was so much about masculinity and and shame of shaggy's sexuality that i that i could really see it come fully formed and and i approached the book that way for the first draft i wrote most of the scenes actually out of sequential order and uh and before i knew it i actually had a first draft of about 900 pages but that was how that was how i got through the first hurdle and just take me through that scene with where they're there they're almost in this sort of post-industrial landscape hugely polluted scottish landscape and um could you just take me through how much of that's from memory how did you see it i mean how did you remember it if it's from memory and if not anyway just take me through it yeah it's a scene um where we actually open where the middle brother leak is sitting on a sea of slag and we think he's by himself at the very beginning but i was thinking very much i was a kid that grew up in north lanarkshire which is the central belt of scotland uh just outside glasgow and i came of age of a time when thatcher had shut down all of the industry and so i grew up not far from a coal mine that was was just left to waste and to rot and for the first couple of years after it closed the kids could still go play we could roam freely it became this huge adventure adventure ground for us but um the older boys in my housing scheme would go and and strip copper from the mine and actually just take it because a way to make a couple of pounds there wasn't enough money coming around and people didn't have any work and and so they were going to strip copper and so although the scene comes from a lot of memories uh in terms of i remember what the coal mine is like and i remember what the copper is i wanted to start it hopefully quite poetically where there's just this young man alone and he's sort of adrift on it he's really at the crest of one of these waves and he's looking out both towards the housing scheme he comes from and then at glasgow in the far distance and he's almost like a thomas hardy character is that's how i always viewed him almost like a young jude folly where he's he's thinking about going to art school and how he's going to get on with his life and then suddenly his younger brother drops in on the scene and we think he's been alone the whole time but he's his younger brother shaggy who is only seven or eight has been trudging across the slag and struggling to get there and as soon as we meet him we almost also realize he's an obstacle to leak's life and to his dreams and i remember an argument in scotland which was a great place for arguments in those years when glasgow i think made city of culture and uh certain intellectuals and very serious people in glasgow said that's a ridiculous name for a city city of culture why don't we call it worker city and the next argument was great because the next document said workers there's no work in glasgow no one's working anymore what are you talking about this work business this idea of scotland the work ethic the ship building the the what you call about that sort of central industrial area the fact that scotland was so implicated in the empire in so many ways you know that suddenly everyone realized i mean it had been happening gradually but as though it was though when thatcher arrived it suddenly became clear to everybody what had been happening in front of their eyes that this kind of this country was being closed down this country was being desecrated uh i just wonder if you could if you could um talk about what this meant to you when you were growing up yeah absolutely um well i come from a long line of proud working-class men you know my my family before me my father my grandfather uh were joiners and slaters and grain hodders and and they believed very firmly in trades and going out and learning a skill and then they would provide for their family we never had very much but we had enough and we were we were very proudly working class in that way and then i'm born in the mid 70s and by that point glasgow's already in a free fall and a decline and so my first consciousness or my first memories are really of all the men not only in my family but around me um unable to find work or unable to find enough work or not work in what they're they're skilled and trained at and so my entire youth was really surrounded by young men unemployment went to about 26 in glasgow uh and stayed there for about a generation and that was really the backdrop um to my youth and it came at a pivotal time as well in the city because glasgow as you said was a very important city in the empire it has a bit of a bloody history as well in terms of how it made its wealth and and were sort of uh reconciling that at the moment but it was a very wealthy very prosperous city it brought a lot of irish immigration uh which later on led to some sectarian problems but it was a very proud uh city and then in the 1950s and 60s it was entirely reorganized because it was far too dense there was a lot of old tenement buildings that didn't have indoor toilets and didn't have uh really the sanitary conditions that families needed and so the city much of it was torn down and reorganized into these housing estates or high-rise flats which at the time i think many people certainly the middle class planners thought this was a great healthful way for families to be organized and and within a few years you suddenly realize that the houses are built too cheaply and also there's no human aspect to it there's nowhere for people to congregate there's not enough green spaces there's maybe no community center in these housing schemes and then on top of that comes in mass unemployment and so you have people feeling both marooned uh actually really physically and also emotionally and then also overlooked by a westminster government and so part of uh the problem with the unemployment was the feeling at putin people's bones it was that sort of the feeling of not being worth very much or not being cared for is a hard thing to to overcome and so a lot of really sticky things swept into the city you know we we obviously have a very bad history glasgow specifically with drink and drugs and addiction in that way and a lot of that still continues on to today but me growing up uh you know perhaps if i'd been a middle-class kid there'd been addiction in my family it would only have been my family and the the families on the streets around us would have been okay but i'd always understood addiction to be a societal problem and because my family had a tough time but then so did the family across the road and two or three up the street a little bit and so there was a strange twisted solidarity in that um the tories and thatcher had it in for the north of england as much as they did for scotland but there seemed something much more intense in their relationship by the lack of a relationship there were bad relationships stories between thatcher the tories and scotland as though there was something about scotland that really offended thatcher and there was something about thatcher that really offended scotland i mean it wasn't an ordinary not voting for her there was something visceral and strange going on yeah there was and i think a lot of it comes from both scottish and irish pride uh you know i'm a kid of both um and irish immigrants and also scots from the north of scotland and glasgow is made up of a lot of irish immigrants and i think we were just incredibly proud and there seemed to be a spirit of wanting to break glass regions of scottish origin or of irish origin too but also an othering of them i always felt i always felt that we didn't belong in in the united kingdom or we weren't cared for in the way that you know the rest of the country was even just through in edinburgh or down in england and certainly not uh we weren't living the same a parallel life to westminster and that just makes you feel very much like you're on your own i think we've for a long time harbored very deep feelings about control and about who uh oversees us and what sort of shape we have to our own what power what agency we have to make our own destiny and a lot of that was came to the fore in the 70s and the 80s uh but glasgow was placed for anyone who's never been was placed as a city in decline uh the government never told anyone in glasgow this but these they categorized it as a place they were going to manage and to decline which meant they weren't going to try and make it better they were going to allow the city to atrophy and that was only really revealed in the early 2000s and it seemed like a very good bureaucratic decision perhaps to these very unfeeling politicians in westminster but it affected over a million people i i swear this story is true that um this is about 25 years ago i was writing something and i needed to check something and i made an arrangement to call a journalist on the scotsman who was a well-known literary figure in scotland and i just had a question from him i said are there any catholic novelists writing in scotland now uh alexander went oh i don't know about this mural spot i know this mural is don't give me muriel smart she's a convert it's not the same i'm talking about people who were brought up in the church brought up as catholics are there any and he's i'm not making this up he shouted down he was in the newsroom obviously or he was in the substance and he shouted down the sub's desk hey guys can anyone think of a catholic novelist in scotland okay that's great that's all i just wanted to check that i wasn't sort of making this up um does that story continue it certainly does and actually it's a funny thing i mean it's a funny thing to think about sectarianism or to think about the role of protestantism or catholicism in the city because it doesn't translate very far outside of the world when i you know one of the feedbacks that i get from shaggy bane is what is this what is that sort of strain of history there and of course i have to link it back to belfast and talk about uh sort of the orange march there and then glasgow having the second largest orange march after that to show you the pride of religion in the city but you know it's strange because my entire identity um in the city was always often defined by my religion first and when i would meet someone they would ask me in a roundabout way do you support celtic or do you support rangers uh because they were trying to get me to out myself in terms of was a catholic or was it protestant and it's it's such a a frequency of life it's such a low-lying frequency of life that only when i became an adult and i came to new york i looked back and i thought god that's really strange yeah um so so that what what what happened in scotland um to just go maybe talk about literary matters for a moment is that in that democratic deficit in the great silence that arose where scotland effectively became a tory free zone with everything everyone held every everything that mattered was destroyed which was the basically the industrial base and what was replaced with the housing just simply didn't work and what our roles were voices and these voices um especially kelman especially aleister gray but also um you know johnny's galloway um a.l kennedy um obviously irving welsh and alan warner jeff tarrington and there's so many names and all of them attempted to make new it wasn't that all of them were certainly finding that it was a great tradition beginning with jane austen which if they could join um and they could write nice novels about um you know nice people going to the edinburgh festival um but something really really important started there which was an almost a sort of late modernism where every writer attempted to do something to narrative to do something to character to terms of sentences you know if there was a party alan warner they would tie up the host it would be new year's eve you know if there was a sentence one for a whole book if there was a man he would be blind if it was another man he would be drunk if there was a if there was a novel it would be written in sections you know it would be competing anyway you know what i'm talking about i'm talking about the extraordinary flowering of literary talent in scotland in in the very years i think you must be starting to read that's right yeah and but actually also uh being a product of the class system i almost had to complete my education and then go in search of them because although this flowering's happening all around me it wasn't like it was put in front of me as a scotsman because we were still reading the classics as you say or a very middle-class english perspective but it was a time of enormous humanity and struggle within that humanity and so you have alexander trocky and you have agnes owens and george freel and all the others that you named and andrew o'hagan as well who are trying to i always think of it as trying to make sense and also claim their place on the planet because as you'd mentioned earlier it was a time of a great overlooking or where it felt like people were so uninterested in us from the outsider we were left to struggle by ourselves and i think when people feel pushed to the margins like that they answer it with really strong voices um and so they are definitely writers that have had a huge influence on me but also funnily enough those writers write often from a very masculine point of view i think about aleister gray or or you know irvin welsh and they're looking at the poor soul or the struggling man in the way that james kelman does but it was often the industrial man or or a male at the center of it because it was often a man's world but i never knew that column i knew a woman's world being a young queer boy uh growing up in the 80s i was absolutely ostracized from the first minute i sort of have a memory and then also being the son of a single mother my entire universe is female and so when i sat down to want to write shuggi i wanted to look at the tradition of all these greats but i wanted to reframe glasgow from a woman's point of view and for my young gay boys i am i think it's sometime maybe maybe 1993 maybe in glasgow on my own one night i thought there was a gay bar oh douglas it was a saddest thing i went into it and i mean there were about 11 hairy presbyterians i have nothing against hairy presbyterians but they looked so guilty they looked so sad there was so much dandruff in the room i mean it was the most frightening thing to witness 1993 it was under a railroad bridge somewhere and they were drinking more than drinking they were staring into the guilty distance you know it wasn't a good place i would it changed very quickly by the way i mean within a few years there were some wonderful wonderful places and gay places in in glasgow i mean they were just kids kids were having the wonderful time but i'm talking about that that cheer was pretty did um so i mean obviously the there's no there was no image for you of being gay in scotland there was no mirror when you looked in the mirror there was nothing you could see no there was absolutely nothing i mean i think any queer culture that was happening but like derrick german or things coming out of the south hadn't quite made it to the working class community yet and any sort of role model we would see that were queer whether it was kenneth williams or or another comedian was always a figure of derision or someone to be laughed at for their femininity and so it was really there was no uh northern star there was no firmament for me to look at and even these bars that were existing in sort of the center of glasgow it was also i couldn't afford to access them or to even go in and see these guilty looking presbyterians uh because the streets that i lived on the housing scheme i was on uh was everything that held me and i think that was actually the shame of it because we talk about it as a time of you know a fair fairly punishing bigotry in lots of different facets whether it was religious or whether it was homophobic but the truth is i just think a lot of things when there was nobody for anybody to follow because i believe very firmly that my family loved me and loved me um very deeply but as a young gay man they didn't even have an example to point me towards and um and that was really the loneliest place to be i think because they couldn't even accept me because they didn't know what it would be like for me and i'm often asked about the sort of the solidarity of working-class communities and and how shuggy almost upends that notion because it can be a cliche sometimes when you're poor you're all in it together and you have to stick together and it is true that there's solidarity in working-class communities but sometimes it's united against you and they're sort of like unified in excluding you and that often was my experience and you mentioned andrew hagan earlier and i i think it's interesting the way he uses um very great griefs very large tragedies occurring in very small domestic spaces so if there's a sitting room and he will fill the sitting room with something much larger than the space might suggest and um so that in a way that that's that idea of working with domestic space you know those small rooms um and filling them with something much larger is i think something that happens in your book yeah and i've always i mean i wanted actually in a very classical sense to think of a hardy novel or an austin novel and create something even if it's ugly at the edges calm as beautiful and as sort of sweeping as one of those books and i had wanted to pay as much attention to the furniture within the bane sitting room as somebody would in a more classical novel but the idea you know is that there are very big stories they're very big human lives being contained in all of these spaces and poverty has nothing to do with the worthiness of it it just changes the backdrop of it or perhaps how people approach it and and so i never really you know it was only really when the book started to enter into this might sound incredibly naive to you but when it started to enter into british literature literary discourse that i was suddenly reminded that oh yeah i'm not like everybody else like these characters are not the same this is you see this as a very story of other people um as a working class narrative because for me it's my entire heart it's my entire universe um and you know these small domestic spaces were are just entire universes where where lives are fought and lost and and entire dramas are played out and you know much of what happens in chuggy bay and is just shaggy watching his mother in these rooms or you know there's a lot of war uh fought over her actual physical body how some men use it how shaggy tries to protect it how she herself enhances it and it all happens in the space of a kitchen a living room and a bedroom i wonder if you could read um a passage just to introduce agnes to us absolutely uh this actually comes from the very beginning of the book and it's when we first meet our our protagonist but she is living in the site hill towers which is one of these urban renewal high rises that uh has since been torn down actually it was used for refugees in the last part of his life and and has since been torn down but um she's looking around her life and her friends that are playing cards on a friday night and starting to chafe at the smallness the women cackled without breaking their concentration on the cards it was sweaty and close in the front room agnes watched her mummy little lizzy carefully studying her hand flanked by the bulk of nan flanagan on one side and rini sweeney on the other the women sat thigh to thigh and towed at the last scraps of a fish supper they were moving coins and folding cards with greasy fingers anne-marie easton the youngest amongst them was concentrating on rolling mean-looking cigarettes of loose tobacco on her skirt the women spilt their housekeeping money onto the low tea table and were pushing five and ten pence bets back and forward it bored agnes there was a time before baggy cardigans and skinny husbands that she'd led them all up to the dancing as girls they'd clung to one another like a string of pearls and sang at the top of their voices all the way down sucky hall street they had been underage but agnes sure of herself even at 15 knew she would get them in the doorman always saw her gleaming at the back of the line and beckoned her forward and she pulled the other girls behind her like a chain gang they held on to the belt of her coat and muttered protest but agnes smiled her best smile for the doormen the smile she kept for men the same smile she had from her mother she had loved to show off her smile back then she got her teeth from her daddy's side and the campbell teeth had always been weak they were a reason for humility and an otherwise handsome face her own adult teeth had come in small and crooked and even when they were new they'd never been white because of the smoking and her mommy's strong tea at 15 she had begged lizzie to let her have them all taken out the discomfort of the false teeth was nothing when compared to the movie star smile she thought they must give her each new tooth was broad and even and as straight as elizabeth taylor's agnes sucked her porcelain now here they were every friday night these same women playing cards in her mommy's front room there was not a drop of makeup between them nobody had much of a heart to sing anymore thank you thank you very much that was beautiful um in the story um of james joyce it's an interesting thing where his father was very unfortunate because he had a son the second son stanislaus who was in the house all the time and he's keeping diaries so we have a full account of just how bad just how drunk and uh really just how malevolent the father was and um we have this from stanislaus but yet when the father appears in ulysses as simon daedalus he he appears in different guys he's um he's a great man on the street people like him he's fully socialized he sings beautifully yes he's left his family in poverty but there's a sort of generosity in the way he's represented in the book that is absolutely absent from stanislaus's versions and of the father in the two posthumous books the diaries and the my brother's keeper i just want to in this context it must have been tempting at some point for you to paint the bleakest portrait of agnes to to really show her as being a very bad mother for example and to have ruined the lives of her children and i just wonder was that instinct there did you have to work against it or was the natural was the generosity in the book and there is great generosity in relation to her i mean she emerges oddly as a great figure as a as a wonderful person and despite everything how did what is a battle you had or did this come from the beginning as it is in the book well thank you for saying that that's that's wonderful to hear it was definitely uh a fine line to walk over the ten years and and i spent a lot of time uh wrangling with that and the question and and trying not to make agnes often a battlefield to make a point or to make a judgment or to or to condemn her i felt when i was writing the book so many people so many of the characters were condemning her or abandoning her or judging her even the women being very infected by the patriarchy were turning their backs on her and i felt as a the writer of the character i didn't want to also do that i didn't want to stick the boot in you know much of the motivation for writing the book is the only one loss i felt with my own mother calm uh you know my mother suffered with addiction her entire life from my earliest memories of her up until she lost that struggle at 16 and and she was a bright gregarious uh generous beautiful woman but she was also deeply hurt and there wasn't she couldn't find her place in the world and she couldn't make her dreams come true and and so she suffered with drink her whole life and and sure she tortured us with it but actually she tortured herself most uh first and foremost and i'm often asked in the book you know it's terrible what agnes does and how she can do that to shaggy and she loses all that for shaggy but actually the character of agnes loses everything herself first and and so i tried to approach the writing of the character with as much empathy as i could and and i found the best way to do that i found two small tricks to do that or two devices and the first one was just show it it doesn't it didn't need me to underline it or to make a point it just needed me to be as honest as possible and with great detail i think comes dignity even when you're looking at ugly things because if you turn away or you shy away or you pull your punch then i think you're saying you're more on the side of the reader than you are of the characters and so i i firmly lined myself up on the side of the characters and then i also wanted to share the burden of the the narrative through the codis of characters why else write a really you know working-class book if you don't bring in all these characters who are living through the same socio-economic times and so i found if i could explain agnes through the prism of leak and her new boyfriend eugene and her mother and the woman across the road then i could paint a richer portrait but i could also hopefully not have to make any deep sort of final judgment on her character through shuggy's point of view i think the fact that chuggi is gay is really interesting and important here and i don't think that's just because you're writing out of um memory or needing to deal with certain things i think as a literary device even if it has nothing whatsoever to deal with you personally it's very important that he has to be isolated that he doesn't have a peer group of kids he isn't one of those boys who goes out every morning with other boys that he's at home he's an in-between figure and this allows him to become a great noticer and so he's at home noticing he's noticing for two reasons one that he's so isolated himself that that that that that the house becomes his world whereas for other boys it might not be but but but i think also that that world is so fragile now that so much it could be lost so easily but he's watching it with so much concern so there's a sort of jewel way that he is um representing the reader as well in the book and that he has an extraordinary ability to see despite his age yeah yeah and actually um you know i think a few things on that sometimes as the children of addicts we become huge watchers you're always watching the weather as it comes into the room and seeing what's going to change and how a day is going to hit the wall or take a turn that you don't want it to because you're always trying to get in front of it and change the situation and protect the parent that's suffering at the at the heart of it and so myself and all my siblings i think are fairly watchful kids um and i wanted chuggy to have that quality because really his mother is his entire universe uh you know he's almost like a little satellite just sort of orbiting her and and keeping his eye on her but she's also the greatest love of his life as well and and i wanted him to cling to it in that way and to watch uh but also it was important for me to show that some kids don't have a safe harbor sometimes when you write about queerness in youth it can become a single issue book or piece of literature and i thought shuggie was facing things that were a little bit more complex than that he's fighting a few wars or i don't know journeys of self-discovery on different fronts he's trying to keep his mother together he's trying to discover himself and he's also trying to actually keep his family close by he's trying to hold leak to them and and trying to uh you know really bond the family together and so i wanted him to to to need i wanted him to face those things so that his life felt very sort of lonely in that way the book for me is about the siege of femininity because the queerness that he's attacked for is never really sexualized i wanted to leave shaggy at 16 before he really gets into his own sexual identity because it's about people not being able to embrace his femininity or his precociousness or his sensitiveness but but ultimately both agnes and him are under siege because they are expressive creative souls that are hyper feminine in a time where that was a very risky thing to be and so i wanted him to be going through that also because i didn't want all the judgment to be on agnes i didn't want everybody else to be all right and us just watching this woman disintegrating at the center that felt a bit cheap to me um and so i wanted everyone else to be suffering with their or struggling or trying to overcome their other things but for me it was about femininity i don't know if that answers it yeah i mean i think you're dealing with something that every gay man i think really knows which is um how to hide it um the business walk the business of someone is watching you and you are moving in the street and there's something you're giving away that you can't stop yourself giving away don't know how to do it and then you learn how to do it what you're saying with chuggy is that he doesn't learn that that whatever is going on is femininity or his queerness is apparent once he goes outside the door so while it's not a safe place for him and he he doesn't have the strategies and that's a very interesting aspect of his character that he doesn't strategize in that way yeah he doesn't he's he's almost so powerless to it and he's also not only his uh femininity but he's also kind of infected by his mother's snobbery and her precocious it becomes precociousness in him but he's seen very quickly as othered by the other kids but i remember very profoundly from my own upbringing that sort of idea of if you practice if you get better at kicking a ball if you just keep kissing girls until something catches or you learn how to walk or you know you become violent before the other boy gets to be violent or in chuggy's point of view he's reading these historical football scores absolutely useless unless you're going to become a football pundit but he goes through them like they're a rosary or a novena and he repeats them as he rushes across the city or whatever he goes and and of course it's powerless to change him but he thinks if he does this and he has an interest in these things it will it will alter him and and that's the really dark power of homophobia is he's told very quickly in the book what's wrong with you you know it's it's it's put to him as a thing he can fix or a thing he should be fixed because he's not like everybody else you know you're no right why are you like that even his grandmother says to his mother you should nip that in the bud as if your sexuality is something that can be nipped in the bud of course it isn't but that was their understanding of it you know fix them fix them make them more masculine make them fit in um and so he's lonely but whatever makes the book so memorable and uh that's a great really is is the figure of agnes um and uh one of the strange things about is even i mean but there's one moment when she's at her very worst where you honestly start to love her which is when she gets when she gets the address book and the phone and you realize oh my god she's going to phone someone else again you're going to look scroll down the names and pick someone and call them and scream at them for some reason i get pleasure out of this i find what so she should i mean this is this is this is also hurt a there's a sense of life in her rage in her but there are other moments um where she really does try to rescue the situation and these are very intense moments because you've seen how how close the abyss is that you know that her drinking is her ability to get to drink you know she could drink for ireland you know and um drink for scotland but we say drink for ireland um because she could drink and she gets that job at night and she's in the garage she really is what's called doing her best and then she meets eugene and you realize this now is you become so tense as a reader because what you have done as a novelist is sort of build an arc for the book that it isn't a simple matter of desolate scotland desolate woman and desolate stuff it is that all of them have this extraordinary amount of glittering life in them and hers with eugene and there's a scene and i should wonder if you could just um um just take us through it for a second where she's in eugene just wants to have a good relationship with her and he wants him to have an ordinary life he says well why can't you not and anyone reading this goes oh please don't do this why can't i just have one or two glasses of wine then you'll be fine and just don't have a third you know they're in a restaurant and she knows what will happen the reader knows what will happen eugene doesn't know what will happen so you have you have a drama now of is she or is she not going to do and um i mean it's an extraordinary piece of tension because after that really it's downhill isn't it i mean it's it's once that glass if i'm not going to give it away but if she drinks that glass of wine we're in trouble we're in trouble and we've been building agnes has been building to this sense of sobriety but it comes back to that question of normal shaggy keeps being asked to be normal and eugene as agnes new love thinks she can be normal he doesn't you know it's a heavy drinking society anyway calm as you know and so the bright line between uh someone who likes to take a drink and then someone who's an alcoholic can be hard to see and it's a bit of a comment on how men fancy themselves as the hero in every situation because eugene keeps saying to agnes i but you wouldn't need to be an alcoholic with me by your side and you know i'll look after you and i'm he's this fine upstanding catholic man you know he's handsome he's very upright he's you know he's very different to the other men that are in her life and and he really comes in as a hero almost riding through the city in this black taxi like it's a steed uh and you know he's going to fix her and but he cannot almost believe he can't accept the limits of his own power or the limits of agnes disease and so he keeps badgering her just have a drink just have a drink it's what normal people do you know we'll have a wee drink we'll have a good time you'll be fine i'm here now i'm here and agnes of course having gone through 250 pages of looking at her disease understands it's not like that at all and so she tries to resist him but i was thinking very much about agnes is a character that's very uh influenced or she's not shaped in terms of her attitude but she's you know her life is molded by the men in it from her father to her first husband to to shug and then to eugene and even to be honest she's got two sons who are watching her and and sort of helping her and it's she's almost a classical heroine in that way and doomed uh you know she's a little bit of a test of the derbervilles but it's the men who shape her fate um around her and eugene's really the linchpin in that but but the other thing i would say is i want the reader to feel the terrorism that shaggy feels when you love someone who is addicted to alcohol you never quite know what you're going to get some some drunks are very consistent they're always angry or they're always sad and i'd never known that i'd known alcohol to be a very combustible thing and you never knew if i was going to get a happy mother or someone who was looking for a party or someone who was looking to you know be incredibly modern and so what the reader goes through is what shaggy goes through in the book where we're always we even start a very bright chapter or very happy chapter and you're waiting for the turn or you're waiting for something to happen because there's even on good days there's a terror uh to loving someone with addiction because you're just always waiting for something bad to happen yeah and and i think as you say it's vital that sugi doesn't grow up i mean that he doesn't become a sexualized teenager that he doesn't start to date someone or fall in love that he that he remains this kid and what you're exploring is is the idea of sexuality or or homosexuality or queerness for a 10 year old for a 12 year old what what that actually means how puzzled you can be by that and how isolated so just wondering if you could read us uh a bit about about actual shocking himself yeah absolutely uh so we were just talking about agnes agnes um at the heart of the book is going on her first date after leaving her first husband her second husband and she's asked shuggy to teach her how to dance uh and so shuggi's teaching her how the kids dance today uh the song changed and shaggy kept dancing it was a self-conscious shimmy now his hands burst open like fireworks and his head flicked as if he had long sexy hair he dipped and he popped using his hips too much for a boy he emoted along with the song like it was a grand opera not a three bar pop factory hit for 13 year old girls brilliant what a smooth mover she said i'm going to do all this up the dancing next week eugene will just die just you wait he was enjoying her attention something inside him flowered and he started popping his body like he'd seen the black boys on telly do the self-consciousness left him and he spun and shimmied and shook in all the telly ways he was made cat sleep when he let out a sharp scream it was high-pitched and womanly the same shriek he let loose when leek left out of the dark at him shaggy stood with his fingers outstretched frozen in time he hadn't seen them at first and he would never know how long they had been there across the street in the window of the front room stood the macavenis they pressed against the large glass window and they were gutting themselves with laughter the window throbbed as they beat their hands against it with glee dirty mousted a little sexy girlish pirouette and shaggy realised that was him he looked at his mother when had she noticed she only looked up at him and took a draw on her without looking out the window she spoke through clenched teeth if i were you i would keep dancing i can't the tears were coming you only know you only you know the only win if you let them i can't his arms and fingers were still outstretched and frozen don't give them the satisfaction mommy help i can't yes you can she was still smiling just hold your head up high and get loudy she was no use at math's homework and some days you could starve rather than get a hot meal from her but shuggie looked at her now and understood this was where she excelled every day with the makeup on and her hair done she climbed out of her grave and had her held hat head her head held her head high when she disgraced herself with drink she got up the next day put on her best coat and faced the world when her belly was empty and her wings were hungry she did her hair and let the world think otherwise thank you all right very much that that passage you read just reminded me of something that there's there's a starkness in this one despite the amount of detail that you'd mentioned at the earlier how do you forgive a character in fiction by putting so much detail in that the reader begins to see them in real time not by a set of easy adjectives but by a very complex set of motives and um sub structures in the book and it struck me though there's a starkness at the heart of the book which has some connection to greek drama it is as though someone has been prophesized into tragedy that there's a doom attached to her that she is somehow or other one of these greek women who emerges courtesy of voice and that is that she has a grandeur she's a much larger figure than the figures around her and the fact that sometimes she's the only catholic on the estate adds to that but but also the fact that we're seeing her in so many different ways and i know but all around her are the shades are the chorus are these groups of women who emerge from outside their houses standing on the street staring at her almost standing in some sort of theatrical pose what you've just described at the window sort of watching in as though we're watching we're watching some ritual being enacted on a scottish housing estate does that mean anything to you yeah it does that's a beautiful reading of it but it does and i'd always understood and wanted to show that they were so formed by the chorus and especially with the the limited mobility of poverty you can't up and escape the people you're on stage with or the people that you live in a housing scheme with you can't just shirk them off and move to the other side of town or or re sort of uh restart a relationship over and so what's happening in agnes life is absolutely right there are all these people coming on stage and and either forming her or turning her or commenting on her or giving her a sense of herself and here's this tragic heroine at the center who actually is quite camping away because she's larger and more glamorous and she fills the page i hope in a very sort of she's so luminous against the grey city and yet they keep coming on to stage and and sort of taking a part of her or commenting on her or punishing her in a way and and for me that you know agnes is the heart of the book i should have probably called it agnes bain but i was thinking about how children are often the splinter of hope that comes off of parents and and even when someone uh collapses under the weight of their life they always hope for better for their kids and so shuggy is agnes i mean everything about him is agnes but yeah i like i like that sort of point of view calm and we were talking at the beginning about my heart attacher and i wonder if it was tempting when you were writing the book or how deliberate it was that yes it's it's very much set in those years when scotland is being actively dismantled by someone very unpleasant and it must i mean another novelist might have put many many more post-industrial scenes or you know really written a national novel about scotland what was happening to scotland at that time i think that you by putting agnes at the very center of the book in a very intense way you've managed to write a novel about the society without actually putting constant passages describing the politics of the moment and i wonder how deliberate that was to leave out not put in what's happening in the newspapers each day yeah it was super deliberate and actually it was part of the editing process after the first draft because i realized when i put in the social unrest the people that would navigate us through that would be the man in the book so it would be wally or it would be leek the middle son and when i did that i sort of left agnes and shuggie out of the frame a little bit because it was certainly a time when men were struggling but what i wanted to show is when men struggle it is women and children who suffer first and often suffer worst but i didn't want to keep framing it around the men i wanted this to be a woman's story in a and a young gay boy story i felt that there was books that already covered that the post-industrial glasgow and and what it meant to be a working man there you know aleister gray does it phenomenally james kellman does it as well um and really what i wanted to do was to even agnes owens who actually is my favorite scottish writer talks about unemployment through a man's point of view uh and gentlemen of the west and uh here was a woman writing about a man but i wanted to just focus on the people who were sort of getting the the effects of this of this shift without showing them as part of it but also because as you said earlier it's a very intimate story i really what i set out to write was a love story i didn't set out to write this big political book um but you can't say a book in 1980s glasgow in the working class without it touching on these really heavy subjects but what i said to write was a love story it's about a mother and a son and how they're uh trying to make the best of a bad situation one of the other real pleasures in the book is the way in which you don't compromise the scottishness of the book notice i marked words that i didn't understand and i loved that i didn't understand i presumed that they were part of the flavor of elsewhere which is what a novel is about it's called the flavor of elsewhere and that you weren't actually talking down to me by putting in a received english word by putting in a you know a proper word where the scottish word was the word you wanted to use that you weren't actually talking down to me and there must have been moments when some editors said to you somewhere or some poor translator said to you what are we going to do about you what are we going to do with this this what do you call it a scottish dialect scottish flavor scottish usage i i know that this is what kel this is the path that kelman and gray and the others all worked on and in in indeed um you know trainspotting gave the world a sort of scottish dialect it's got an idiom but it but nonetheless there must have been moments when someone said to you could you could you do something about this word because i don't understand it yeah i think um i don't know that they necessarily said it to me but i think it was part of shaggy being rejected so often by publishers um i think it was so specific calm that people were wary of it um but when i was writing the book i was i wrote it in service to the characters and these are two people that probably don't turn to literature but also don't find themselves in literature very often and i didn't want to then write about their lives and then exclude them from the work that i was that they're focused in and so every choice i had even using scottish words but even sometimes as a writer when i was describing the weather or the sunrise i didn't want to i wanted to use the language of the people and to use something that they could also relate to and if i was explaining something as being the color of two milky t the dawn light that they would you know they could they know what two milky t looks like and and that was really sort of part of part of my challenge there but you know gray and kelman really fought to bring the scottish vernacular to the force so that a book like sugary could fly really you know they they did all the heavy lifting back in the 90s so that people could embrace a book like shaggy but by god i think i'll spend the next four years of my life explaining what a tenement close is to to translators everywhere in the world is about to be translated into mongolian which i mean this keeps me up at night business being irish with ulysses and that you spend your time thinking how can any outsider understand those sort of terms that are in that are in joyce's book um i i think the books i think if you were teaching how to write a book the principles by which you worked the principles of making the character as complex as possible and allowing something to emerge sometimes it emerges slowly sometimes it's very clear which is the astonishing love that exists and tenderness between the mother and the son it and it's not a damaging love although it is sometimes every time you do something you do the opposite for a while and then you play with it it's but i think at the heart of the book it is a sort of love song written and from the perspective of a son to a very damaged mother i would that would be that's all i ever wanted to achieve so if that is true and you're a kind man for saying that then i would be thrilled i just you know i think it's a it's a work of fiction it is not a memoir it's not my life but i've been so profoundly and actually your work's been such a huge influence on me as well and thinking about mother and son relationships i think about the story of the night all the time uh when i'm writing uh because there you have richard goray also sort of moving beyond the loss of his mother as he as he sort of moves into his own sexuality column and i think i've just been so profoundly affected by the loss of my mother at 16 that of everything i write is almost a love story tour even the books i'm working on now it's just about how do you overcome this the biggest love of your life and losing it too soon especially when it's so um it's not that it's mindless to addiction but you know you you feel like such a failure as a son i think because you spent your entire life trying to save them or or make it better or help and and of course at the end of the day the battle rages within within the addict alone and you can only do so much and actually that's what shaggy comes to realize at the end of the book you know that's what his siblings that's how they increase the stakes from throughout it because they keep saying she's not going to get better and then they find their point to leave and hopefully as readers were wondering when does shaggy find that point or does he um but yeah it's about love and i mean it's been a hugely moving and affecting book and in ireland um even though i mean only i think only half of you is irish but we can claim that half we're very proud we're very proud of you just want to say that this book is available on books online from court and that anyone who wants to check out other events at court can go to www.court.ie and douglas stewart thank you very much for doing this and thank you for being so open and and easy and uh i know some of my questions were too long but um anyway thanks thanks for not for not objecting to that and uh oh i hope to see you and we're all looking forward to your next book thank you very much calm thank you for talking to me today it is an honor of my career to talk to one of my heroes i don't mean to fanboy over you in front of everybody but you've had such an influence on my writing so this has been one of the highlights of my entire career thank you that's great okay thank you

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Published: Sun Apr 25 2021