Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Sunset Song is a novel is about the transition of a farming community in the Northeast of Scotland as the world presses in on it in the early twentieth century, bringing with it mechanisation and war. It is also about the changing role of women in society as the protagonist, Chris Guthrie, stands up to the authoritarian father that has brought so much misery to the lives of her and her family.

John Guthrie is a mean-spirited and brutal man, bringing with him a constant threat of physical, mental and sexual abuse, all in the name of ‘The Kirk’. He is symbolic of the self-loathing that Calvinism brought to Scotland, as demonstrated in various traumatic scenes in this book. In one scene Guthrie returns home on a beautiful, sunny day to find his daughter helping her mother clean the bed-clothes by stomping on them in a wash-tub outside, naturally having stripped to her underwear to do so:

“[…] her father’s face went all shrivelled up and he cried “Get out of there you shameful limmer and get on your clothes!” And out she got, white and ashamed, shamed more for father than for herself, and Will [her elder brother] turned red and led off the horses […]

The threat that John Guthrie carries adds to the harrowing nature of this scene, and will no doubt register with anyone unfortunate enough to recognise the warning signs of a potentially violent man. That Chris feels shame for her father is because she knows the difference between right and her father’s hypocritical Presbyterianism.

Making their living from the land, the community are at the mercy of the elements, and the storms and fires foreshadow another force out-with their control . . . the onset of the First World War. Here, symbolism is used again: as the trees are stripped from the land to support the war effort, so too the young men are stripped from their homes to serve in France. Whilst home on leave, one local soldier takes stock:

“He thought the land would fair go to hell without the woods to shelter it.”

Of course, some men come back from the war, but in many cases, these mentally scarred men have become angry and violent and heap the same misery upon their families as John Guthrie had. Their self-loathing churns within them like the storms that marked them.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon was brought up in the rural Northeast of Scotland and served for a number of years in the armed forces, immediately following WWI. That the author has put a lot of himself into the book is evident with the anecdotal tales of the country and the war that intersperse the plot, many of which are the sort of humorous stories that my grandmother used to tell, bringing light-hearted relief to the reader amongst the severity of life; the kind of strength in the face of adversity that is characteristic of many working-class folk. He also tells us of the coorse-tongued maliciousness spread by gossips that seek to hurt others with the spite and jealousy that made my granny glower.

The language used by Gibbon is a literary device which never ceases in its cadence, even when delivering the most distressing scenes. He masterfully captured The Doric (a dialect of Scots spoken in the Northeast of Scotland) and developed a language that is accessible to readers without losing any of the lyricism, turn of phrase or droll wit that characterises the people of the Northeast, all of which is critical to the telling of this story.

(See more discussion on dialect in my post ‘Authentic Voices’.)

Stylistically, LGG also renders speech in italics, which aids the seamlessness of narrative and dialogue, especially when writing in a rhythmic dialogue such as this. I used this device to blend narrative and speech in ‘This Is What You Get’. Set some seven decades later, the world and the spoken dialogue have moved on, but the themes, societal and political issues have barely changed at all.

In the end, ‘Sunset Song’ is about forgiveness, an unspoken past and the bonds between family and friends.

Like Lewis Grassic Gibbon, I drew upon my experiences in the army to write ‘This Is What You Get’, and I used a version of the language spoken by the characters that inhabit the pages to give them authenticity and to give them a voice that is true to who they are, and I hope, in a way that approaches the mastery of Lewis Grassic Gibbon and those other dialect writers that have inspired me and given me the courage to pay tribute to the languages of my ancestors through the characters that represent them.