Sunset Song

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He lived with no rights whatsoever, as all tenant farmers did, and woe betide the man who failed to doff his cap. This has had a massive negative effect not only on farmers but also their workers who depended on them.

Heilbron said in one interview about the start of her career: “I went from playing an aristocratic German countess to appearing as this Scottish peasant girl so it was a big contrast, but it turned into one of those productions where everything came together. When I lived in Greater London I passed the cut off for Welwyn Garden City more than once, not knowing that Lewis Grassic had lived and wrote there. Amazing, I wish I had turned off to explore. For some reason Bella, which initially told me it wouldn’t print my first contribution, has now published both. Ach weel!

Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

I was from Glasgow so I had to learn to speak the (Doric) language, because it was so important, but some of the cast were from the north-east and they helped me in every way they could. Chris subsequently marries Ewan, a local crofting lad. Gibbon’s description of their wedding is lyrical as is his account of the first few years of their marriage. Indeed, his portrayal of the young couple, deeply in love, working the land and raising their young son together is one of the most romantic evocations I’ve ever read. Over the past few years, my duties as First Minister have taken me to First World War centenary commemorations in Arras, Amiens and the Somme. I have heard and been humbled by the real-life stories of those who fought, died and survived. And yet so often I’ve found myself thinking about the fictional Ewan Tavendale; about how the war brutalised him, turning his happy marriage to Chris into a nightmare of abuse and contempt. And about how, far away in a field in France, he had suddenly come to his senses, overcome by the futility of it all: James Leslie Mitchell couldn’t have imagined, while he was walking through the fields of north-east Scotland, that he would join the pantheon of the great literary figures. Most importantly, there is song, ringing out through the natural rustle of wind and bird and harvest, threatening to transform this drama into a musical, that purest of cinematic fantasias (no surprise that Davies cites Seven Brides for Seven Brothers as inspirational). When the Guthrie family move house to accommodate their ever expanding brood, they do so to the strains of Wayfaring Stranger hauntingly sung by Jennifer John. On her wedding night, Chris performs a keening rendition of Flowers of the Forest, the music of which is woven into the very fabric of Grassic Gibbon’s text. Later, Ewan (Kevin Guthrie) sings a few line of Robert Burns’s The Lass That Made the Bed to Me, another song taken directly from the rhapsodic sacred source. Throughout, Davies’s aim remains true. He is perhaps the only film-maker in the world who could stage a tipsy rendition of Ladies of Spain without the slightest hint of a Spielberg reference (it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d never seen Jaws).

Burns wrote ‘My Heart is in the Highlands’ for James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, to which he was a contributing editor. According to Burns’ notes that accompanied its publication, his song is a remix of ‘a string of shreds and patches from various sources’, including ‘The Boys of Kilkenny’ and ‘The Strong Walls of Derry’, a couple of Irish anti-Jacobite songs. 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. But that I say it still, more than thirty years and hundreds of great books later, demands more examination. Sunset Song is a 1932 novel by Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon. It is considered one of the most important Scottish novels of the 20th century. It is the first part of the trilogy A Scots Quair. If this new edition is prompting you to re-read Sunset Song after many years, as I have just done, you will find it has lost none of its appeal and emotion. And if you are about to read this remarkable novel for the first time, you are embarking on a profound journey”

It just was common that fathers were feared rather than loved. Fathers were not expected to play a role in child care. But they were also generally respected. Respect was the basis of filial regard rather than love. A good father was one you could look up to and respect. Love did not come into it. It was rare to find examples of loving fathers who actually played with their children and were fun to be around and openly affectionate. It was mostly found amongst fathers who were comfortably off, and had leisure, like Charles Darwin who was broken hearted at the death of his young daughter, or E. C. Milne’s father who had the time to write Winnie the Pooh books to entertain his young son. But even then, Christopher Robin still remembered his father as emotionally remote.

One side is the intellectual Chris that excels at school, is a voracious reader and wants to be a teacher, the other Chris is her more spiritual, emotional side that is at one with the land and the people of the Mearns On the contrary, there was a timeless quality to what he wrote, which is why he is remembered and held in such high regard. In the second chapter, the twins are still babies. Learning she is pregnant again, Jean falls into despair. Unable to get help from her society, she goes insane, killing the twins and then herself. After the tragedy, Guthrie drops out of school, going to work on her family’s homestead. Her eldest brother, Will, absconds with a girl from Kinraddie, marries her, and moves permanently to Argentina. John is enraged by what he perceives as his son’s betrayal of their family, which causes him to suffer a stroke. For the rest of his life, he is paralyzed. While bedridden, he makes sexual advances to Guthrie, who refuses. Above all, he portrays the cataclysmic impact of the war on a generation and their expectations. Chris loses her men, she has to cope with rumours of cowardice and desertion, and she sees the territory around her transformed. Life was hard for her – a cruel, incestuous father and a community that was often unforgiving in its iron-clad morality. But she was stirred by the power of the land, and therefore clung with her heart to a past that hadn’t been kind to her.

Years later Mitchell dedicated his exhaustive analysis of the history of the Mayan civilisation to his headmaster, Mr Alexander Gray of Echt. Finally, Scottish exceptionalism isn’t the claim that Scotland and the Scots are ‘better’ than other nations. Rather, it’s the claim that Scotland and the Scots are different from other nations in every respect; that is, that they’re ‘unique’. Scotland and the Scots are not exceptional or unique in that the concept of a ‘national psyche’, which is culturally reinforced by a common language and/or heritage, is nowadays as inapplicable to them as it is to any other nation. 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. Universal viewer requires JavaScript. To view this content wihtout javascript select the ' Large image' display mode.