Sunset Song

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Of course, in so many ways, the lives and experiences of the characters in Sunset Song are worlds away from my own. I grew up in a very different place and time. The harshness of rural life in the years leading up to and through the First World War was beyond my direct ken. That, though, is part of the appeal. The book quite literally introduced me to a part of my own country – Aberdeenshire – that until then had been as alien to me as a foreign land. It opened my ears to a language – an echo of the speak of the Mearns – that was of my country, but not really mine. It seeded in me a fascination and deep affection for the names, places and people of the North East of Scotland. To this day, a journey to Aberdeen past the road signs for the towns and villages of the Mearns always makes me think of Sunset Song – of Kinraddie, Blawearie, Peesie’s Knapp. To be fair, in the world of town planning and urban design Welwyn Garden City is an important land mark. One that has much to say in many debates today. That is a fascinating interpretation, MBC. Especially the empirical basis of your observation: “Living on a diet more of meat and milk, Highlanders were taller and stronger than Lowlanders. I discovered this from studying adverts for runaway soldiers in the Caledonian Mercury in the 18th century. A surprising number of Highland runaways were 5’ 10” – Lowlanders were a good few inches shorter.” An unforgettable evocation of a way of life that has slipped away … It is a love song for a landscape and language still familiar – and precious – to a generation born long after [Grassic-Gibbon] died … Chris is one of the great women of 20th-century fiction”

I have had further time to reflect after my angry comment above. I am no longer angry but feel that this article is an embarrassment. 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. The first time I read A Sunset Song, I put it down for about a year as I couldn’t stand John Guthrie. If people forget the brutality of the book I think it’s because of its transcendent beauty which is the abiding memory.How should Scotland distinguish itself, for example, from England, New Zealand, or even more challenging, from Ireland, if not by its uniqueness or ‘psyche’?’ But the novel is also, and without a hint of sentimentality or ‘kailyardism’, a story of human resilience and spirit.The characters draw strength and perspective from the land, even as it takes its toll on them. 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. And they remind us that the joys and heartbreaks of our own lives are but the blink of an eye in the grand sweep of history. It is a story of both transience and continuity. It’s also now a politically dangerous concept. Part of the danger is that we interpret ‘other’ cultures from the point of view of the culture we regard as ‘normal’. Thus, we identify Gaelic or English as the common languages that reinforce ‘the Scots psyche’, even though many Scots nowadays have neither Gaelic nor English as their first language. Likewise, we identify the historical heritage that reinforces ‘the Scots psyche’ with that of Wallace, Knox, and Burns, even though many Scots nowadays don’t have any of that as their cultural inheritance. The danger is that Scots who don’t conform to the ‘normal’ psychological profile or archetype are excluded as ‘Scots’.

Chris Guthrie is the most passionate and appealing heroine in Scottish literature; Grassic Gibbon’s magnificent novel is fresh, powerful and timeless” There is no better description of the way all these young men from small villages went off to fight in a war, which the majority of them didn’t understand, and from which so many never returned.Thank you for pointing out where the blue plaque is – I hadn’t been able to find it on Google Earth ! I’ve never been to Welwyn Garden City. I’ll maybe go sometime!

This novel taught me more about the Great War – its human impact and consequences – than I would have learned in a dozen textbooks. At some passages, I cried – moved more deeply by a book than I had ever been before. Indeed, over the past few years, my First Ministerial duties 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: The Reformation was a turning point in Scottish history. At the religious level it signified the end of five hundred years*of dominance by the Roman Church, leaving in its place a unique brand of radical Presbyterian Protestantism. At the political level it broke centuries of close cultural and military links with France and replaced them with even closer, though often very uncomfortable, links with England: links that would lead inexorably to the unification of the crowns of England and Scotland 43 years later, and the Act of Union between England and Scotland 104 years after that. And at the cultural level the Reformation swept away much of the previous five hundred years of human endeavour as radical Protestant iconoclasm turned into an effort to destroy every piece of art, sculpture or architecture in any way associated with the hated “Popery” » At the same time, it is important to remember that you are writing your argument out in English. Assuming any Scot wanted to affirm or deny your argument requires literacy in English.’ Much of what you say is true in that many migrants and residents in Scotland have neither English nor Gaelic as their first language, and the alternatives need to be welcomed and adapted into a Scottish cultural fabric.’ 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.It presumes that particular nations have distinctive psychological make-ups which are culturally reinforced by a common language and/or heritage, which of course they don’t. Nowadays, we’re more accustomed to thinking of nations as ever-changing pluralities of language and/or historical communities.

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: There does not seem to have been any previous contributions to Bella from this author. Just a plug for two books. It’s not your intentions I am questioning, Mike. I am fairly comfortable that you are not longing for Boris to survive to be joint king with Charles. 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.

The last sentence with its references to cultural fear and (self) loathing may explain that persistent Scots psychological cringe.