Sunset Song

Product Information

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 … 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.

The novel touches on several issues; the distinctive, not always positive character, of small rural communities in the North East of Scotland, the role of women, and the "peasant crisis" i.e. the coming of modernisation to traditional farming communities. [1] The theme of the onset of modernisation and the end of old ways is explored using many symbols, for example, violent deaths of horses (supposed to represent old, traditional farming methods) and the appearance of motorised cars representing new technologies which brush the people of the land from the road. The author also has some political opinions reflected in the characters of Chae Strachan, the Socialist, and Long Rob, the pacifist, and he shows how they react to the coming of the war. The dilemma Chris faces over whether to continue her education or commit to a life in the land is also featured. The title of the novel is a direct reference to the theme of the sunset of the old ways and traditions. By some readings Chris is "Chris Caledonia", an allegorical figure for Scotland itself. [2] [1] Literary significance and criticism [ edit ] As she said: “There is a universality about Sunset Song which strikes a chord in so many different places. One of the comments above suggests the important point that what Gibbon was seeing is an east of Scotland more than a west of Scotland feature. While that would be hard to establish objectively, I think the east-west divide has roots deep in the nature of the land. The fact that the east is mostly fertile agricultural soil long made it a magnet for consolidated feudal power, based on coercion and the normalisaiton of violence. That’s not to say that there wasn’t also violence on the west coast. There was plenty, and brutally so like the Eigg massacre. But this was more within an indigenous framework where matters were easier to process locally through time – a case more of lateral violence (equitably, from the side) than vertical violence (from top down, and hard to engage with, thereby the pressure spilling out laterally). In the west, indigenous communities could be more themselves for longer because, until the Cheviot came in and the clearances began, the land was not worth grabbing and settling in for anything much other than subsistence. I suspect that in the west with Iona etc., Christian influence was also stronger, and the bardic tradition that it built on carried a kind of immunity in conflict that gave the culuture richer roots through which reconciliations might be effected. It is said that Grassic Gibbon (just 33 years of age when he died, even younger than that other Scottish genius Robert Burns at the time of his death) wrote this masterpiece in six weeks. In doing so, he gifted us one of the finest literary accomplishments Scotland has ever known.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. He replied: ‘It tells the story of peasants the world over’ and I understood exactly what he meant. 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 grandparents’ 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 the ‘proper English’ we hear on the television, but also knowing that it is the best and purest way of expressing who we are. In the novel Gibbon uses the rhythms and cadences of Doric, the north east Scots language to capture the land and people of Kincardineshire and in doing so helped create a new tradition of Scottish writing quite distinct from the English novel. And anybody who watched television in Scotland in the 1970s will recall Vivien Heilbron in Bill Craig’s adaptation of the Lewis Grassic Gibbon novel, which was brought to the big screen by acclaimed director Terence Davies in 2015 with Peter Mullan, Agyness Deyn and Kevin Guthrie in the lead roles.

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. The Union is reinforced by the intertribal rivalries of the ‘Four Nations’ in, for example, the fields of sport and culture. In that respect, the UK is a bit like the subdivision of a school into ‘houses’, with each house having its own tribal identity as expressed in its totems and traditions and patriotism.Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic novel of love, war and rural life laid out the tensions between the old and the new Scotland. As the heroine Chris Guthrie, one of the strongest female characters in the world of literature, Vivien Heilbron was tough and she was tender; feisty and flirtatious; intelligent and intuitive. This is the book I would have voted for as I had fallen in love with it at university when studying it as a set text. The book’s language is mesmerising. Indeed ‘the speak’ of Kinraddie is unforgettable not just because it’s a novel literary device but because it echoes Scottish speech. Gibbon’s description of ‘the land’ is also memorable as is his portrayal of the devastating effects of war and mechanisation on a Scottish agricultural community. 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.

Fine words in defence of the Garden City, not just a town but an ideal, a movement even, with a better life for all as it’s goal. 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. Kinraddie, the book’s fictional setting, also represents a world in transition.The rural practices and way of life that the story’s characters have always known are increasingly challenged by advancing technology and the impact of war. A central theme of the book is the passing of the ‘old Scotland’, a theme powerfully articulated towards the end as the minister unveils a memorial to the parish’s war dead: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. Above all, it was the conflict that brews in Chris, between tradition and modernity, learning and the land, moving away or staying put, that resonated with me. The town, an experiment if making a better world for the working class would be attractive not to mention a contrast to the world he wrote about in Sunset Song. 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 was the old Scotland that perished then, and we may believe that never again will the old speech and the old songs, the old curses and the old benedictions, rise but with alien effort to our lips. Thank you for your care. You have drawn for my attention many things I hadnie even considered when I first read – and was transported by –‘Sunset Song’– in the early 1960s. And thus enriched my appreciation of the contorted heritage we Scots have.

Privacy & Transparency

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. 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. On the contrary, there was a timeless quality to what he wrote, which is why he is remembered and held in such high regard.