Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1901–1935)

I found this a very moving book overall. The way it follows the death of a way of living in Scotland, one in which my grandparents grew up in, is very well handled and true to what I have heard. I can't really comment on the use of Scots, being Scottish myself it flowed beautifully and lyrically, but I can understand that people who have never encountered Scots before may get a bit lost. I think the time period before the war can often become romanticised, and this book steers far clear of show more it. It shows both the ugly side of the 1900s and the beautiful side. I can't agree that modernisation is always bad, but it is heartbreaking to watch as Chris drifts away from the land she feels she belongs to and to know that her way of life is dying. I loved this book, but I don't know if I could read it again. It is a very sad book and I cried many times throughout it. Showing how war destroyed not just the soldiers but the communities back home, how it changed everybody and everything of that time. If you have not already, I would certainly read this book, although heartbreaking at times, it does justice to its subject, how war changed a society. show less

This is a book I have been wanting to read for a while because it is so revered in Scottish literary circles. It is something of a period piece, in that the lifestyles of ordinary Scots living in rural Kincardineshire were already largely lost by the time it was written in the 1930s, and plenty more has changed since.

Interestingly Grassic Gibbon felt his use of dialect words should have been intuitively comprehensible to readers outside Scotland - for me this was increasingly true as the show more book goes on, but the introductory section, in which he describes the history of his little patch of Scotland as described in oral legends, is riddled with dialect and I found myself referring to the glossary several times in almost every paragraph.

At heart this is a rites of passage tale, which describes the teenage and early adult years of its heroine Chris Guthrie as she grows up in a small farm, gains an education but has to abandon it when her mother commits suicide - her elder brother leaves for Argentina soon afterwards so when her domineering father dies soon afterwards she chooses to keep farming alone. The later parts of the book are overshadowed by the Great War, which eventually changes almost everything.

Overall I found this an interesting and enjoyable read which largely succeeds in its evocation of a lost world. show less

A long, powerful, moving, and ultimately pitiless account of that generation in Scotland who lived (if they were lucky) through the First World War and saw the rural lives of the crofters swallowed up by a new urban society. The first book of the trilogy is the most astonishing – all the pleasures of a Bildungsroman combined with a very rich and involving portrait of life in a Scottish farming village where we get to know and care about almost every inhabitant. The coming-of-age element is show more the more remarkable because of how brilliantly Gibbon seems able to understand his female protagonist: Chris Guthrie is completely convincing. Even the many cool, introspective, observational scenes of her alone – which in less skilful hands could easily have seemed voyeuristic – have an air of genuine sympathy and truth to them.

But she saw herself then in her long green skirt, long under the knee, and her hair wound in its great fair plaits about her head, and her high cheek-bones that caught the light and her mouth that was well enough, her figure was better still; and she knew for one wild passing moment herself both frightened and sorry she should be a woman, she'd never dream things again, she'd live them, the days of dreaming were by; and maybe they had been the best….

The language the novel is told in seemed so surprising to me at first that for a long time it simply didn't remind me of anyone. The narrative voice is a synthetic kind of Scottish English, in which the cadences and vocabulary of Scots are constantly bubbling under the surface. Often the English words only make sense if you take them to be codewords standing in for their Scots cognates, such as the way ‘brave’ is used to represent the Scots word ‘braw’. At other times, especially in the dazzling opening sections of the book, there is a generous larding of terms that may have some readers south of the border, or overseas, grinning in bewilderment (if, like me, you enjoy that sort of thing):

Ellison had begun to think himself a gey man in Kinraddie, and maybe one of the gentry. But the bothy billies, the ploughmen and the orra men of the Mains, they'd never a care for gentry except to mock them and on the eve of Ellison's wedding they took him as he was going into his house and took off his breeks and tarred his dowp and the soles of his feet […] and at the term-time he had them sacked, the whole jing-bang of them, so sore affronted had he been.

The result is a language that – despite its being a kind of construction of Gibbon's – struck me as utterly authentic: I believe everything he says. It also allows for some subtle effects in the later books as the narrative voice becomes more fragmented and less idiosyncratically Scottish. What's more, that inherent textual tension between Englishness and Scottishness reflects a key point of the book – that Chris herself is constantly torn between what she thinks of as her ‘Scottish’ self, who loves the land and its people, and her ‘English’ self, who wants to get away from there and learn to speak ‘properly’. (This is a false dichotomy many in Scotland may recognise even today.)

two Chrises 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.

You can see here the interesting narrative technique of switching to the second-person, which happens frequently throughout all the books – a ‘you’ that is sometimes Chris, sometimes a vague townsperson, always drawing the reader deep inside the emotions of the novel. Here's another example, from Cloud Howe, during a virtuoso depiction of a town fête.

The teas were all finished and Melvin had opened up one of the tents for the selling of drams, folk took a bit dander up to the counter, had a dram, and spoke of the Show and looked out – at the board, the gloaming was green on the hills, purple on the acre-wide blow of heather. There was a little wind coming down, blowing in the hot, red faces of the dancers, you finished up your dram and felt fair kittled up; and went out and made for the board like a hare, damn't! you might be old, but you still could dance, you hoped the mistress had already gone home.

You might already detect the dominant tone creeping in under these passages: bittersweet, nostalgic, somewhat disillusioned. This mood darkens across the trilogy into something you could eventually fairly call bleak. But in the first book, when Chris is still young, the bleakness is just a part of Scotland's beauty; and it's perfectly-evoked with many accomplished descriptive passages.

it came on Chris how strange was the sadness of Scotland's singing, made for the sadness of the land and the sky in dark autumn evenings, the crying of men and women of the land who had seen their lives and loves sink away in the years, things wept for beside the sheep-buchts, remembered at night and in twilight. The gladness and kindness had passed, lived and forgotten, it was Scotland of the mist and rain and the crying sea that made the songs – And Chae cried Let's have another dance, then, it's nearly a quarter to twelve, we must all be off soon as midnight chaps.

There are parts of Sunset Song that had me almost open-mouthed with admiration, long passages which can't be quoted because their power comes from a cumulative brilliance, pages and pages which left me scribbling uncharacteristically superlative notes in my paperback: WOW! – how did he do this? – Is there ANYTHING to match this? and so on. The wedding scene was one such; another was the eventual story of what happened to Ewan in France. It's also often very funny – much funnier than I've made it sound in this review.

It's a little unfair in some ways that the second and third books in the trilogy have been overshadowed by the first. They are sadder, and the scope is less focused, but in their own way I thought they were equally fascinating and well done. More to the point, Sunset Song depends for its power on the fact that we are reading about the last throes of a particular way of life, and it's essential to Gibbon's project that he sees that through and describes exactly what comes after. To my mind, the first book is strong precisely because it is followed by books which detail Chris's move to a town and then a city, so that we feel the nostalgia for her country upbringing just as she does. Similarly, the urban interplay and Socialist parables of the last book only work because they come after such a naturalistic evocation of traditional Scottish country life.

Cloud Howe and Grey Granite are increasingly political, and some reviewers have even criticised Gibbon for being somehow ‘taken in’ by Socialism, but I don't recognise that at all. Sure, the writing shows a deep sympathy with the workers – as it damn well should – but there is no sentimentality here. Socialism, like religion, is dismissed as just another ideology, and if this trilogy is anything, it's unideological. The overriding message is rather that nothing at all is certain except change – that nothing, including love, but also including pain, can last forever, and that this is life's greatest sadness as well as its greatest comfort.

But it's certainly true that while you can deeply admire books two and three, it's only the first one that you fall in love with. As you near the end of the three novels, you are desperately hoping that Gibbon will throw you something to hang on to at the finish, some hint of the ‘cool kindness’ he talks about elsewhere. But you know he's too good to be kind at the expense of authenticity. The very end of Chris's story is like Scotland itself – bleak but not cruel, sad and beautiful. I'm pretty sure this trilogy is a masterpiece. show less

I have just finished re-reading my favourite book, Sunset Song, probably for the fifth or sixth time. It’s a book I first read as a student in secondary school―hated―and then fell in love with.

The novel tells the story of Chris Guthrie. Born into a farming family in the north-east of Scotland as the 20th century begins. The ‘Song’ is divided into sections that follow the farming year and mirror Chris’s own life; The Unfurrowed Field, Ploughing, Drilling, Seed-time, show more Harvest and then, once again, The Unfurrowed Field.

Like many students I really struggled with the prelude to this book when I first read it as a teenager. It’s written very differently to the Song, without the strong first-person narrative. I’m pretty sure that I would have read this book as Something To Be Read For School (a chore) but there must have been some reason that I was left with a desire to read this book again at some point the future.

Each time I have read the book as an adult I have been struck by different aspects of the story. With this most recent reading I was more aware of the pace of the story and struck by the small size of the geographical area in which it is set.

The language of the Song is unashamedly Scottish (or pseudo-Scottish) and agricultural — “education’s dirt and you’re better clear of it”. People are fine or course, from good stock or course stock. But the language also has a fine, delicate, poetry such as the example below.

“That died, and the Chris of the books and the dreams died with it, or you folded them up in their paper of tissue and laid them away by the dark, quiet corpse that was your childhood.”

And this expresses the theme of the book―nothing endures. Through Chris’s eyes we witness the end of a way of life, the end of the small tenant farmer and even the end of the land. show less