L. G. Gibbon’s Sunset Song is, as said on the cover, “the Scottish masterpiece”. In a literary world dominated by the Central Belt —McDermid, Trainspotting, Stevenson—our pop culture overlooks the art of northern Scotland. And yet, Sunset Song remains the finest book I’ve read.
I consider it Scotland’s best gift to modernism—that movement encompassing Hemingway, Joyce, and Woolf. Gibbon pioneers a new and unique writing style, possibly the closest to oral storytelling I’ve read. Like Joyce, his work concerns “everyday folk” in meticulous detail, and like Woolf, he builds on “difference of value” (in the words of Glenda Norquay) regarding gender and sex.
I was delighted to find in Sunset Song a feminist POV—a profound “female consciousness”—unafraid to shy away from the harsh truths women face. Gibbon’s characterisation of his protagonist, Chris Guthrie, is so convincing that Helen Cruikshank refused to believe a man could have written her.
The plot is a (relatively simple) rural drama set in the Mearns leading up to WWI. Chris Guthrie is a teen farmgirl torn between her studies, individual ambitions, family loyalties, and love for the homestead. Events ensue that test her and the fictional village of Kinraddie: life, love, death, and change. Through Sunset Song, Gibbon explores themes of sexuality, Scottish identity, and the deaths of rural communities.
Against the sentimentalism of Victorian fiction, Sunset Song is starkly realist. It may be set in a croft house, but it is not cottage-core. Gibbon’s pessimism and political outrage underlie its story, especially given the context of fighting for an English king in a futile war. The author was just young enough to miss the call in 1916 but would have witnessed his friends leave, never to return. Like Chris Guthrie, he grew up in a small Kincardineshire village. His depictions of rural life, therefore, come from experience.
In that truth, there is both good and bad. Sunset Song made me cry at parts and laugh at others; the author captures what it means to love a land as unforgiving as Scotland’s: it is a relationship of blood, toil, and devotion. Readers today might not understand Chris’s hesitation to leave home for schooling, but as a Highland crofter, I know the feeling well. I grew up in a very different age and on the other side of the Grampians. The air, the pitch dark at night, and the quiet freshwater mountains and ruins will always draw me back home.
What surprised me was that although Gibbon’s Kinraddie is a tiny community, it never feels isolated until the outside world intervenes. If anything, the connections between its characters are stronger than most modern friendships, forming a complex, interdependent ecosystem. Perhaps we have Gibbon’s narrative to thank, weaving the tale like a local gossip or a farmer offering you a dram beside the fire. The book is witty, charming, and brutal.
As its title suggests, folksong is a recurring motif. The centuries-old ballads through which Scotland’s peoples told their stories were, by the 1910s, a dying breed. Yet, in many ways, Sunset Song continues that tradition. Not only does it feature many beloved songs of the northeast, but it is a hymn itself.
Thus, I’ll finish on my favourite passage from the book, the passage which earned the book its place on my bedside table:
“…it came on Chris how strange was the sadness of Scotland’s singing, made for the sadness of the land and sky in dark autumn evenings, the crying of men and women of the land who had seen their lives and loves sink away in the years, things wept for beside the sheep-ouchts, remembered at night and in twilight. The gladness and kindness had passed, lived and forgotten, it was Scotland of the mist and rain and the crying sea that made the songs.”
We must never stop singing them.
Image Credit: “File:Lewis Grassic Gibbon lived here… – geograph.org.uk – 1329312.jpg” by Bill Harrison is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.