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"The Lost Glen" vividly portrays a clash of cultures and personalities against a background of a landscape in visible decay. The cultural collision and its effects are explored through Ewan, a young local man recently returned from university in disgrace, and a retired English colonel staying at the village hotel. Both men in a sense are alienated from the community, the younger because of a haunting sense of failure, and the older through an unwillingness to understand the local culture. They have a mutual antipathy. The Colonel's self-imposed cultural isolation leads to aggressive bullying and an openly lascivious attitude towards local young women. His unworthiness as a representative of Anglo-Saxon culture is largely compensated for by his young niece, who behaves with sensitivity and integrity. She is clearly attracted to Ewan whose sense of failure is complex and does not only concern his enforced withdrawal from university and his involvement in an incident at sea that cost his father his life; it concerns the feeling he has of himself as a spiritual exile - a man who had intended to emigrate but who had remained as an outsider in the land that meant so much to him. He is fascinated by the experience of a local piper, whose finding of a lost glen that had a strange beauty and primordial freshness had been translated into a pibroch. The haunting tune acts as a stimulant to Ewan's Hamlet-like musings on the possibility of a rejuvenation of the landscape or a final disappearance of its life and meaning. The antipathy between the two main protagonists leads to a physical struggle between them that brings to an end a novel, layered with meanings, that is more a symbolic drama than a novel of realism. One of the earliest novels to appear in the Scottish Literary Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, "The Lost Glen" turns its back on the form of writing that had depicted Scotland as a rural paradise in favour of describing Highland life as it really was at that time.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Even on the level of story alone, this novel makes enthralling reading and builds up to an enthralling climax, but that is not all.
It tells how Ewan MacLeod is driven off course at university and has to return in shame to his home village on the Scottish coast, where he becomes a tragic hero, caught in the slide from Scotland's noble past (symbolized by the lost glen) into humiliating subserviance, in which the poor must choose between open defiance of the law or selling their souls to the English and Americans.
Gunn is at his best when describing the destructive force of the stormy sea and man's constant battle to survive its dangers. The early scene in which Ewan nearly drowns with his father is followed by passages which may strike the reader as tedious by comparison, but it is worth persevering. In the second half, the plot darkens and gathers pace, sweeping Ewan towards his inevitable clash with the corrupt and bloated Col. Hicks and the darkness beyond.
Gunn's use of darkness and storm to indicate the alienation, despair and frustrated passions of his hero is remarkable, as it was in "The Serpent", but as he finally staggers to the cliff edge with his terrible burden, we are encouraged to feel that his soul may yet be saved by the spirit of self-sacrifice in which he has struggled to preserve the integrity of his people.
It tells how Ewan MacLeod is driven off course at university and has to return in shame to his home village on the Scottish coast, where he becomes a tragic hero, caught in the slide from Scotland's noble past (symbolized by the lost glen) into humiliating subserviance, in which the poor must choose between open defiance of the law or selling their souls to the English and Americans.
Gunn is at his best when describing the destructive force of the stormy sea and man's constant battle to survive its dangers. The early scene in which Ewan nearly drowns with his father is followed by passages which may strike the reader as tedious by comparison, but it is worth persevering. In the second half, the plot darkens and gathers pace, sweeping Ewan towards his inevitable clash with the corrupt and bloated Col. Hicks and the darkness beyond.
Gunn's use of darkness and storm to indicate the alienation, despair and frustrated passions of his hero is remarkable, as it was in "The Serpent", but as he finally staggers to the cliff edge with his terrible burden, we are encouraged to feel that his soul may yet be saved by the spirit of self-sacrifice in which he has struggled to preserve the integrity of his people.
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