Sunset Song [Paperback]

Many people seem to think this novel is "about" Chris, the central female character. Personally I thought it was about rural Scottish life in the early 1900's, and how a particular community comes to be affected by issues far outside of its own borders and its own control.

The close relationships and way of life within a community such as this, means that even very trivial events or actions carried out by an individual all carry great importance to others. Gossip and rumour necessarily play a significant role in the novel.

The unique writing style of the novel does initially make it very hard to read. Sentences are long, and are often not restricted to a single subject or idea, but once the reader learns to engage with the narrator and understands the style, it is like being told a story by a trusted friend.

By the end of the novel, the reader can closely identify with each of the characters, and as their individual fates are decided, it is impossible not to feel a high degree of sympathy for each of them. I personally found it a very moving read - but must admit that had I not had to study this book as part of my degree, I may well have put it down early on and not picked it back up - that would truly have been a great shame. Stick with it, and you will be glad you did!

No this isn't the easiest book to read - I'm a Scot but found myself referring to the glossary regularly. Though adding words like 'gowked' (stupified) and 'glunch' (to mutter half threateningly, half fearfully) to my vocabulary may be worthwhile! While the opening section which describes the village of Kinraddie and its occupants is hard going. However, once the story starts and sets the focus on it main character Chris Guthrie what develops it wonderful.

This is a beautiful picture of a soon to be lost way of life - small holding tenant farmers eking out an existence in north east Scotland at the beginning of the 20th century. Gibbon creates a number of strong memorable characters, Chris, Chae, Long Rob of The Mill who bring the whole thing life, by the end I felt I had known them all personally. While the life of the village is conveyed affectionately yet unsentimental, there is no shortage of hardship and precious few unblemished characters. This is also a surprisingly modern novel in the way it deals with sex - never explicit but definitely sensual.

The coming of the WW1 heralds the end of the way of life that the village had known for generations. Gibbon paints a very believable picture of how that war impacted on one remote village.

By the end I felt I had had a little peek into the lives of a generation of Scots - little older than my parents - yet whose lives were so different from my own

No easy read - but well worth the effort.

'Sunset song' is a hauntingly beautiful tale. I came to it whilst living in North-east Scotland. Sunset song, and the companion novels making up 'A Scots Quair', are written in a blend of English and Scots words that only at first seem strange or daunting, you soon find that Grassic Gibbon evokes a lost age in a unique and very effective manner, using very little dialogue (in italics), but talking to the reader all the while. The novel, like much of his writing, is concerned with our lot as man `a mist appearing for a while, then disappearing' (James 4:14), inequality, and the lost `Golden Age' of the Greeks and Hebrews.
Faced with a choice between her harsh farming life and the world of books and learning, Chris Guthrie eventually decides to remain in her rural community, bound by her love of the land, and the croft set in its 'parks' on the Howe. The story returns, again and again, to the early inhabitants who left the standing stones. Grassic Gibbon paints these people, not as warring savages, but as peaceful adventurers. The First World War with its futile brutality is the real de-humaniser.
Chris is now a widowed single mother: her farm, and the surrounding land, is altered beyond recognition - trees torn down, and people displaced. But the novel describes a way of life which is in decline, as John Guthrie said, 'We'll be the last of those who wring a living from the land with our bare hands'.
Chris adapts to her new world, displaying an intuitive strength which, like the land she loves, endures despite everything. 'Sunset Song' is a testament to Scotland's rural past, to the world of crofters and tradition which was destroyed in the First World War, and hence the title of the novel.
It is a powerful description of life in the first decades of the century, and the challenges faced by Chris in the different chapters of her life. Although the story is not just about Chris, as the central character, all else seems to revolve around her.
It is a story of its own place and time, but reminds us.. 'sea and sky and the folk who wrote and fought and were learned, teaching and saying and praying, they lasted but as a breath, a mist of fog in the hills, but the land was forever, you were close to it and it to you, not at a bleak remove it held you and hurted you'.
I agree in a sense, to look at cycles is a way of understanding what the author is telling us about life, for example, at the end (in Grey Granite), when Chris returns to the croft in Barmekin where she was born, and where she will die.
If it helps, this quote from 'Prejudices' by HL Mencken, sums up the spirit of the post-war period, and 'Sunset Song', '..the world as it stands is anything but perfect, that injustice exists, and turmoil and tragedy, and bitter suffering of ten thousand kinds, that human life at its best is anything but a grand, sweet song. But instead of ranting absurdly against the fact..or trying to remedy it with inadequate means..we seek contentment by pursuing the delights that are so strangely mixed with horrors..such is the intelligent habit of practical and sinful men'.