Sunset Song (Canons)

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From discussions with numerous people about the novel I know I was not alone in ignoring, or forgetting, the cruelty inherent in Chris’s domestic life or the abuse commonplace in the wider community. Is this because it’s so familiar to us personally that it’s unremarkable? Is it because we are so used to reading Scottish stories where the protagonist has to thole an authoritarian father or deal with brutality, family dysfunction and emotional neglect that we hardly notice it? Both are true for me and for many other Scots.

After a few weeks I reread it. I was stunned. Sunset Song is much more like Davies’s version than the romantic one I held in my head or advanced by admiring readers like First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, who championed the novel in that BBC poll. Behind the warm glow I think one has also got to be careful about attributing this harshness to Scotland rather than to Victorian and Edwardian generations. My father was not British and although he wrote tenderly of his father after his father’s death in his diary as kind, dedicated and faithful (that’s my memory of my grandfather too) he commented to me once that in the generations before his father (i.e. my father’s grandfather, Stefan, born around 1860) that people of that time seemed to be hard and judgemental. But that ‘nowadays’ (1980s) people were kinder and more inclined to want to assist those who had fallen on hard times rather than judge them as weak, profligate, or failures.Conocemos a Chris cuando apenas es una niña que corre por las colinas de Kinraddie, la cabeza perdida entre lecturas y ensoñaciones. Chris ama profundamente la tierra que la ha visto nacer, pero al mismo tiempo es consciente del duro destino que le espera cuando deba hacerse cargo de su propia granja y de su propia familia. Lo ha visto en los ojos de su madre; en esa mujer cansada, melancólica y rota que recuerda con nostalgia los tiempos felices de su infancia... Sunset Song” and the other volumes of “A Scots Quair” have never gone out of print but his other books are more difficult to get hold of. His first book “Hanno” a non fictional meditation on exploration and explorers has never been reprinted since its first appearance in 1928. Be quiet, quean, else I’ll take you as well. And up to the barn he went with Will and took down his breeks, nearly seventeen though he was, and leathered him till the weals stood blue across his haunches; and that night Will could hardly sleep for the pain of it, sobbing into his pillow …

As for Lesley Mitchell, the people he wrote about did not recognise themselves in his descriptions of them. They were generally ‘affronted’ and not just his father. Is that denialism? Or did Mitchell consciously exaggerate the harshness for dramatic effect? Or was it not also partly the effect of his own nervous disposition? He went through several breakdowns and people who are mentally unwell have distorted views of reality. It may be real to them – we have to respect and empathise with their subjective feelings as have an internal validity – but others may see the same events and characters differently. People are complex. I remember my grandfather as sad, because I have a vivid sense of his carrying around a great deal of unspoken pain the last time I saw him. I did not know it then (I was ten years old) but he was dying of stomach cancer. My sense of his silent suffering was not my invention, but it had different causes than mental pain, which I did not understand because that knowledge was not told to me. My sister though remembered a different man, in happier times, when he would dandle us on his knee and sing us songs to amuse us. Memory can be very subjective. There are many layers to memory just as there are many layers to character. People are psychologically complex, and a person who is mentally ill sees certain layers and not others.The novel itself is set in the years before and during WW1, amongst a community of small tenant farmers in the north-east of Scotland. Their age-old way of life is facing its end as the modern world reaches them. Both the characters and the landscape are wonderfully conjured into life, but whilst the novel has a definite “end of epoch” feel this is no romanticised portrait of past rural life. Incest, suicide and marital rape all feature, and there’s a strong theme of how people are either brutalised or worn down by the harshness of their lives. Particularly impressive was the way LGG perfectly captured the gossiping and scandalmongering that goes on in this type of community. There’s plenty of tragedy in the book, but some great humour too. Sunset Song is profound. It is heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting and life affirming. It tells a story of a Scotland that, in some senses, is no more, yet, in others, still lives in the hearts of each and every one of us.

He developed – maybe invented is not too strong – a kind of word music of his own, without becoming as iconoclastic as Hugh MacDiarmid, who was writing poetry at the same time, in which he tried to re-invent a whole lowland Scots language that was consciously set up in opposition to English (which I once heard him describe as “a linguistic disease”, though admittedly he was drunk at the time). Grassic Gibbon’s prose, sometimes glorious, is stamped with individuality: he never seems to be imitating anyone else’s style, but going his own way. 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 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.Por un lado Chris es un personaje maravilloso, que sabe sobreponerse con valentía y dedicación a todo lo que le llega, con su alma divivida por el amor al estudio (esa alma más inglesa) y su pasión por la tierra (su parte más escocesa). Contemplamos la vida que lleva de niña en el seno de una familia complicada, en la que la figura de su madre deja una huella imborrable en ella y en el lector. La vemos crecer y tener que hacerse cargo de la familia, la vemos enamorarse, sobreponerse a la muerte, a la llegada de la Primera Guerra Mundial que va a acabar con todo tal y como lo conocían en Kinraddie hasta ese momento... exceptuando el amor por la tierra. I am listening to the audiobook narrated by Eileen McCallum. You have to pay attention. Understanding the Scottish dialect is difficult, but worth it. I don't understand all the words. Most you understand from the context. The dialect captures the colloquial speech of the area. The dialect is said to be artificial, but I didn’t realize this. McCallum's intonation reflects the humor, sadness and anger found in the lines. She sings the Scottish tunes. Five stars for the excellent narration. In my view the narration enhances one's appreciation of the text.

The book is essentially a lament for the passing of a way of life. Gibbon shows how the war hurried the process along, but he also indicates how change was happening anyway, with increasing mechanisation of farms, the landowners gradually driving the tenant farmers off as they found more profitable uses for the land, the English-ing of education leading to the loss of the old language and with it, old traditions. Although the cruelties and hardships of the old ways are shown to the full, he also portrays the sense of community, of neighbour supporting neighbour when the need arises. And he gives a great feeling of the relative isolation of these communities, far distant from the seat of power and with little interest in anything beyond their own lives. But here too he suggests things are changing, with some of the characters flirting with the new socialist politics of the fledgling Labour Party. The cruel aspects of Gibbon’s story flow in part from his diffusionist philosophy which blames agriculture for society’s woes. He also detested religion and thought Calvinism responsible for the Scots’ unnatural attitude towards sexuality and the human body. But Leslie Mitchell, Gibbon’s real name, had his own personal reasons to feel alienated from his family and culture and to consider it brutal. Another part of the danger lies in our reluctance to ‘give up’ our normal. Then we get into fights about ‘our’ national identity and its perceived dilution by ‘foreign incomers’, and ‘national movements’ of people sharing ‘national’ beliefs and aspirations. A short biography of Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell) and a brief summary of his published works.Sixteen books written by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1901-1935), regarded as the most important Scottish prose writer of the early 20th century. All were published in the last seven years of his life, mostly under his real name, James Leslie Mitchell. They include two works of science fiction, non-fiction works on exploration, short stories set in Egypt, a novel about Spartacus, and the classic 'Scots Quair' trilogy which includes 'Sunset Song'. Mitchell's first book 'Hanno, or the future of exploration' (1928) is rare and has never been republished. But I do know that I, and I suspect many Scots, found in her something of myself and what it meant to be Scottish; and that she helped me make sense of the conflicts and choices my teenage self was grappling with. I understood through her the love/hate (but ultimately love) relationship with the land that many of us feel. Through Chris, I could give expression to the feelings that stirred in me as I looked across the field and out to the sea from my grand-parents’ croft on the west coast of Scotland – dreaming of going to university in the “big city”, but knowing that part of my soul would always belong there. Chris also helped me understand the inferiority complex that working-class Scots can sometimes feel, worried that our way of speaking isn’t “proper English”, but also knowing that it is the best and purest way of expressing who we are. Chris, who has had some education, considers leaving for a job as a teacher in the towns, but realises she loves the land and cannot leave it. Instead, she marries a young farmer called Ewan Tavendale and carries on farming. For a time, they are happily married, and they have a son, whom they also call Ewan. However, when World War I breaks out, Ewan Sr. and many other young men join up. When he comes home on leave, he treats Chris badly, evidently brutalised by his experiences in the army. Ewan dies in the war; and Chris subsequently hears from Chae Strachan, who is home on leave, that Ewan was shot as a deserter but that he died thinking of her. She begins a relationship with the new minister, and she watches as he dedicates the War Memorial at the Standing Stones above her home. The Sun sets to the Flowers of the Forest, bringing an end to their way of life, forever.