Sunset Song (Canons)

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The central character is a young woman, Chris Guthrie, growing up in a farming family in the fictional parish of Kinraddie in the Mearns at the start of the 20th century. Life is hard, and her family is dysfunctional. As you enjoy it, I invite you to marvel at this. It is said that Lewis Grassic Gibbon (just thirty-three 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. Pero desgraciadamente la niñez no es eterna, los años pasan y, muy pronto, Chris debe hacer frente a la dura realidad. 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.

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. 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. Qué se puede decir cuando una termina de leer una joya como esta? ¿cómo hacerle justicia a un libro que se ha adorado de la primera a la última página?The author himself had a personal philosophy that mixed a sort of primitive Christianity with Marxist economics. He believed that organised religion had corrupted the original message of Christianity. His worldview comes through in the novel, where two of the most favourably drawn characters, Chae Strachan and Rob Duncan, are both men with leftist opinions, whilst the local Minister, Rev. Gibbon, is a hypocrite of the first magnitude. If the book has a weakness, it lies in the author making this message a little too obvious. It’s a minor complaint though in what is otherwise a first-class novel. The last section of the main text, just prior to the epilogue, is superbly delivered.

The thing to understand is that It was less wage slavery than a way of life. Despite the itinerant nature of this way of life, social relationships were maintained through the farm households and bothies, the weekly markets, and the quarterly fairs. Countries were much smaller: for example, I once worked out that my grandmother had lived her entire life within a sixteen-mile radius of where she was born. My grandfather was only ever displaced from his native country in Stirlingshire by the First World War and its aftermath, which disrupted rural populations in Scotland in ways that Robert Colquhoun eulogises in Sunset Song. Strong and abiding relationships were maintained in the smaller worlds of the farming communities of the time, as evidenced by Robert McLellan’s Linmill Stories. Jean Murdoch, Long Rob, Chae Strachan, Ewan Tavendale...y, como no, Chris Guthrie, una joven inteligente, salvaje, valiente y bondadosa, encabezan una lista de personajes que no voy a olvidar en la vida. 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.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. Lewis Grassic Gibbon, escribió esta primera parte de la Trilogía Escocesa en 1932. Siendo reconocida como una de las obras cumbre de la literatura escocesa del siglo XX, no ha sido hasta este año que hemos podido disfrutar de esta novela traducida al Castellano de la mano de una editorial independiente. La edición, acompañada de un mapa y de un estilo y maquetación encomiables nos brinda una experiencia lectora imprescindible de la mano de una traducción simplemente perfecta. 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.

In the Epilude, a new Reverend at the church in Kinraddie commissioned a monument to commemorate the men of Kinraddie who were killed in the war. The Reverend began a romantic relationship with Chris and Chris attended the unveiling of the monument with her son. 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.

Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

I know there are many historical-fictionistas out there who dislike dialects and there is a further modernist warning: A brilliant book that fully deserves its reputation. Highly recommended, though I should warn you I sobbed solidly through most of the second half...