Sunset Song Revisited

I recently reaquainted myself with "A Scots Quair" by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Leslie Mitchell). I first read these books more than fifty years ago. Sunset Song without doubt my favourite and a book worth delving into again and again. Having time now to really understand its nuances. Communities, particularly rural and farming communities are inextricably bound to nature which in days gone by sustained them by providing food from land, hill, sea and river. Both work and the season of farm life are used in Sunset Song as metaphors for the physical, emotional and spiritual growth of Chris Guthrie as a woman, as well as giving us insight into the harsh physical work each season entailed, and how the farmer had to work with nature and have the support of the community to survive.

The harsh nature of living off the land, and the sense that close farming neighbours such as Long Rob of the Mill, Chae Strachan, and even Munro were in the same boat created a community of close neighbours who at times could judge each other harshly yet would not hesitate to help one another in a crisis. Kinraddie itself was part of the greater community at large but not so intimate as around Blawearie. The fire at Peesies Knap brought out the best in this intimate community where you would give aid to a neighbour. They were all dependant on each other for mutual aid at times of hard work, especially at harvest, where if the weather was favourable the work had to be done quickly and efficiently while the weather held. This sense of community was based not on only on work but also trust and closeness built on friendship for each other, despite the common failings of folk and their tongues as portrayed in the book.

 

The standing stones are a recurring theme in Sunset Song. The stones were probably Pictish of which there are quite a few to be found in farming areas. Where there is more than one stone, some say that you can measure the lunar cycle. The mystical tie between ancient culture, nature and man is felt by Chris who uses the stones and the loch as a sort of retreat and thinking place. Interestingly her father who comes over in the novel as a strict Presbyterian, who threatened Will Guthrie with violence for saying “Come over, Jehovah (p.30) to Bess the horse after he groomed her, seemed to dislike them, perhaps for what they represented? “And he glanced with a louring eye at the Standing Stones and then Chris had thought a foolish thing, that he kind of shivered, as though he were feared, him that was feared of nothing dead or alive, gentry or common.”

 

Communities that are close to the land or sea, can be identify and believe in more than one spiritual concept. Christianity and superstition often blending into each other. The ancient and modern Scots were/are no different, and perhaps this is what Gibbon is getting at in the book. John Guthrie chooses his Calvinist blind obedience over the mystical and timeless spirit and tie with nature and season emanating from the stones. Perhaps his jealous god and the beating life gives him in making a living make him resent the very nature with which he must work in harmony. Ironic that he should dislike them as this was the people he possibly came from. Perhaps as in Highland River, where Neil Gunn asked where the Picts went? and suggests all we need is to look in a mirror and we will see.

 

Not all nature is portrayed as harsh in Sunset Song though. “Below and around where Chris Guthrie lay the June moor whispered and rustled and shook their cloaks, yellow with broom and powdered faintly purple, that was the heather but not the full passion of its colour yet.” Although times could be harsh, each season has its beauty in nature, and you can smell summer in this quote. Often the prose relating to nature and season were placed alongside the growth both spiritually and sexually of Chris. Drilling has perhaps some of the best prose in the book. Nature, its smells and whole evocative feeling of a good autumn night during the “harvest madness” weaves around the awareness of Chris that she is no longer a girl and has become a woman “growing up limber and sweet, not bonny, perhaps, her cheek bones were over high and her nose over short for that, but her eyes clear and deep and brown, deep and clear as the Denburn flow, and her hair was red and was brown by turns, spun as fine as a spiders web, wild, wonderful hair”.

 

Later in the novel, Kinraddie community life turns nasty when Long Rob decides he will not join the army. Assumptions are made that he is a coward or a conscientious objector and the community turns against him. Communities tolerate eccentricity up to point, but only for some, failure to conform to the norm, or going against the majority often turns the community from a benign social group into something nasty as was the case for Long Rob. Rob is no coward but a man of conviction. Both he and in particular Chris, struggle with identity. She is both Chris of the Howe, and Chris of the books and learning. Caledonian Antisyzygy* There is an undertone of the struggle between conforming to be part of the community, and the individual who if they step out of the social norm will be excluded and pulled to pieces by wagging tongues. Rob bowed to pressure from within himself. At least he went to war on his terms.

 

The effect of the Great War on small farming communities was devastating, and most never fully recovered. The eulogy for the fallen by Robert Colquohoun in the Epilogue describes this, and the tie with the land and nature. “And who knows at the last what memories of it were with them, the springs and the winters of this land and all the sounds and scents of it that had once been theirs, deep and a passion of their blood and spirit, those four who died in France.” This illustrates the tie between land, nature and community as for what else were they fighting other than what they perceived as a threat (from government propaganda) to their families and community. “Chae looked at young Ewan and said Ay, man! And he told them “they’d brought out a fine bit bairn between them, every man might yet have to fight for bairn and wife ere this war was over;”

 

Even at the last Gibbon emphasizes the feel and smell of nature and the pull of community. When Chae spoke to Ewan on the morning of his execution for desertion he asks, “But why did you do it Ewan?”

Ewan replies. “It was that wind that came with the sun, I minded Blawearie, I seemed to waken up smelling that smell. And I couldn’t believe it was me that stood in the trench; it was just daft to be there. So I turned and got out of it.”

 

And then Ewan said, sudden like, it clean took Chae by surprise, “Mind the smell of the dung in the parks on an April morning, Chae? And the pewits over the rigs? Bonny they’re flying this night in Kinraddie, and Chris sleeping there, and all the Howe happed in mist.”

  

“and the standing stones up there night after night and day after day by the loch of Blawearie, how around them there gathered things that wept and laughed and lived again in the hours before dawn, till far below the cocks began to crow in Kinraddie and the day had come again”

 

In the end, despite all life can throw her way, the indomitable Chris moves forward with her life but does not lose her sense of being bound to nature and the seasons. She accepts the way of folk in a community but ploughs her own furrow through life.

*Caledonian Antisyzygy is basically the joining of opposites. Some have argued argued that this 'union of opposites' forms the basis of Scottish literature. Take Glencoe as a landsacape example. Glen of Weeping and dark gloom. Valley floor of green pastoral fields and clean sparkling water. Without the mountains mist and rain the fields would be barren.