Sunset Song

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But, for all that, it was Chris Guthrie that gave the novel the place in my heart that it still occupies today. I am genuinely not sure if it is true or a stretch to say, as many do, that the Chris of Sunset Song – and the two subsequent novels that make up the Scots Quair trilogy – personifies Scotland. I assume you would be equally dismissive of any attempt to discuss “Frenchness” or “Italianness” or “Russianness” on the basis that any such discussion must inevitably lead to “exclusion”.’ I have been an avid reader of fiction for as long as I can remember, probably longer. My childhood memories are full of the stories of Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, Laura Ingalls Wilder and many more. For me, nothing – not TV or playing games with friends, nothing – could beat the joy and exhilaration of being transported by a story to a place of the imagination. I still love and marvel at the power of story – of plot and twist and anticipation – to lift us from our own reality. But, for all that, it was Chris Guthrie that gave Sunset Song the place in my heart that it still occupies today. I am genuinely not sure if it is true or a stretch to say, as many do, that the Chris of Sunset Song – and the two subsequent novels that make up the Scots Quair trilogy – personifies Scotland. Why on earth do we want to distinguish ourselves in kind from the people who live in England, New Zealand, or Ireland? What purpose does such estrangement serve? Only nefarious purposes I wat.

The thing to understand is that It was less wage slavery than a way of life. Despite the itinerant nature of this way of life, social relationships were maintained through the farm households and bothies, the weekly markets, and the quarterly fairs. Countries were much smaller: for example, I once worked out that my grandmother had lived her entire life within a sixteen-mile radius of where she was born. My grandfather was only ever displaced from his native country in Stirlingshire by the First World War and its aftermath, which disrupted rural populations in Scotland in ways that Robert Colquhoun eulogises in Sunset Song. Strong and abiding relationships were maintained in the smaller worlds of the farming communities of the time, as evidenced by Robert McLellan’s Linmill Stories. And do we really need to be so terrified of talking about Scots from the past who have made a contribution, in case this makes someone feel ‘excluded’. That’s a terribly anglocentric thing to say. By virtue of the same argument, anyone who wanted to affirm or deny something written by a Scot who doesn’t write in English, but who writes in Gaelic or Urdu (say), would require literacy in Gaelic or Urdu. Why should English be privileged over any of contemporary Scotland’s other languages? It’s a long time since I played Chris (she returned in the second and third parts of the trilogy, A Scots Quair, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite as the ’70s progressed) but she was such a fascinating character. Leslie grew up in rural Aberdeenshire and was a profoundly unhappy child. He begins a semi-autobiographical novel, The 13 th Discipline , with the story of how, as a five-year-old child, a boy sets off from home with the express desire ‘to commit suicide’.

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Throughout Sunset Song, there is repeated reference to ‘two Chrisses’ as a way of describing the conflict that she carries within her. It is best articulated in this beautiful passage which I still think of regularly: But that I say it still, more than thirty years and hundreds of great books later, demands more examination. Throughout Sunset Song, there is repeated reference to “two Chrisses” as a way of describing the conflict that she carries within her. It is best articulated in this beautiful passage which I still think of regularly: The first in a trilogy called A Scots Quair, Scottish author Lewis Gibbon’s novel Sunset Song (1932) follows a young Scot Chris Guthrie who is raised in a dysfunctional farming family in Kinraddie, a fictitious estate in Scotland’s northeast, Kincardineshire. Guthrie has a difficult life, punctuated by the larger geopolitical crisis of World War I. Gibbon develops his own mythology for this fictional Scottish place, embedding its events and characters in an allegory that points to Scotland’s crisis of identity during the war and postwar periods. For its deep characterization of the social and emotional texture of Scotland, the novel has become a household staple for Scots and has been entered into both the Scottish and Anglophone canons. In a flash it had come on him, he had wakened up, he was daft and a fool to be there; and, like somebody minding things done in a coarse wild dream there had flashed on him memory of Chris at Blawearie and his last days there, mad and mad he had been…

How should Scotland distinguish itself, for example, from England, New Zealand, or even more challenging, from Ireland, if not by its uniqueness or ‘psyche’?’

Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

On the contrary, there was a timeless quality to what he wrote, which is why he is remembered and held in such high regard. How could anyone read sunset song and talk about the brutality of john guthrie, a tenant farmer without mentioning the brutality of the tenure he existed under?

The last sentence with its references to cultural fear and (self) loathing may explain that persistent Scots psychological cringe. two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you’d waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you’d cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies. Thank you for pointing out where the blue plaque is – I hadn’t been able to find it on Google Earth ! I’ve never been to Welwyn Garden City. I’ll maybe go sometime! Grassic Gibbon died in 1935, at the age of just 33, from peritonitis, brought on by a perforated ulcer. But he has left behind an indelible legacy.Ach Carol, whit a shame so many Bella voices get swept up in nonsense – like the precise status of Welwyn Garden City – rather than your perceptive words. Words which have helped me better understand Sunset Song. It has certainly been my favourite Scots novel since I first read it many decades ago – when I was a teenager. There is no better description of the way all these young men from small villages went off to fight in a war, which the majority of them didn’t understand, and from which so many never returned. The Mill of Benholm in Kincardine, which was chosen by the BBC team filming the serial of Sunset Song. Mitchel was a socialist, a communist even. The garden city movement has complex origins but a good part of them are in the idealism of the cooperative and Arts and Crafts movements and the developing traditions of the trade Union movement. Welwyn Garden City had an active communist party branch and a relatively skilled and well organised work force drawn from working class communities right across the UK as well as strong non conformist and artistic communities.

The book is many things, a powerful fictional response to the First World War and its impact on a small rural community, a hymn to the natural beauties of the north east and its language and people as well as a lament for a way of life that is coming to an end. It is also a realistic account of rural life in Scotland with its privations and occasional brutalities. It is above all else though a book about Chris Guthrie and her path through life from a wide-eyed adolescent to a worldly-wise woman of 24. Along the way she suffers terribly, knows the pain of loss and the fulfilment of love but never loses sight of the beauty and power of the land around her. When it was published in 1932 it was an immediate commercial and critical success and it has never been out of print. It is now regarded as a classic and in 2016 was voted Scotland’s favourite novel in a BBC poll. The novel endures just as Chris Guthrie endures. Sunset Song tells a beautiful, though often heartbreaking, story. Set in the north-east of Scotland around the outbreak of the First World War, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel is unsparing in its harsh realism. Crushing poverty, the toil of earning a living from the land, the sternness of religion and the oppressive reality of life for women in particular – these themes provide the context for the lives whose stories unfold in the book. a b Norquay, Glenda Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Women, in International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Scott Lyall (ed.) (2015) I remember talking to somebody in Greece many years ago and he was raving about the book and I asked him why.

It’s a work that is regularly voted Scotland’s favourite book in public polls, is acclaimed across the world, and remains the most evocative piece of prose ever penned about the Mearns with its message that people will come and go, laugh and cry, live and die, but only the land endures. Grassic Gibbon – his real name was James Leslie Mitchell – was radical in the way he used language (as he was in politics) to convey feelings in descriptions that read as if they are the inner thoughts of people, rendered with a poetic pulse that he manages to sustain against the danger that the artificiality might get too much. The book’s personality is shaped by that language. I agree with some of what you say, but I think, in your determination to warn of the dangers of nationalism, you throw the baby out with the bathwater. Your assertion that there will soon be no ‘normal’ culture to which we can refer is dubious – the only question is, what will that culture be like. Why can’t the new ‘normal’ culture be characterised by its diversity?’ The central character is a young woman, Chris Guthrie, growing up in a farming family in the fictional parish of Kinraddie in the Mearns at the start of the 20th century. Life is hard, and her family is dysfunctional. Why now are we getting an article that reflects badly on Scotland’s now distant past? Can we look forward to further pieces highlighting the treatment of witches, sectarianism or whatever shameful demonstration of the failures of the current people of Scotland.