Sunset Song

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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. 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. 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. At almost ninety years old, Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon has shown itself to be an enduring classic, nothing less than one of the greatest books of the 20th Century.

Her eldest brother, Will, absconds with a girl from Kinraddie, marries her, and moves permanently to Argentina.

The ancient Standing Stones, at which the book’s main character, Chris Guthrie, seeks refuge at times of grief or personal turmoil, help to place the story and its setting in a historical context. Part of the danger is that we interpret ‘other’ cultures from the point of view of the culture we regard as ‘normal’. 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. 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. At his funeral, Chris realises what happened to her father and breaks down in tears as she never knew the hardship he has endured for them.

Yes, he’s brutal, misogynistic, violent and aggressive, abusive, intolerant and guilt-ridden, but he’s also heroic, loyal and neighbourly, courageous, and ambitious for Chris. It is set in the early 20th century when the outsi According to Mitchell’s biographer, Ian Munro, his mother was also a problem for him: ‘Always quick to say what was in her mind, she had a tongue that could be wicked, cutting, and even venomous, and when angry had little control over it.The church’s new minister announces that the estate will erect a statue in honor of its people who died in combat. It was also a life of unremitting hardship and poverty, haunted by the ever-present spectre of want and disease and the threat of destitution. They were heroic; they met the adversities of life with courage, fortitude, and great resourcefulness, and with as much of the dignity of independence as they could garner.

He is today recognised as one of the outstanding figures in Scottish literature, most famous for A Scots Quair, the trilogy of novels which begins with Sunset Song.When it was first published, some readers were shocked by its realistic treatment of sex and childbirth, and its sometimes negative portrayals of family life.