Sunset Song

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Universal viewer requires JavaScript. To view this content wihtout javascript select the ' Large image' display mode. Islamic state and Taliban were not the first to realise that profound change comes only by killing the roots, the image, the word, the idea of the fully creative human. The results are well recorded. Outsiders’ perceptions can help jolt us out of cultural blindness. In 1989 the German academic Peter Zenzinger published an essay on contemporary Scottish fiction which is telling. He notes that disenchantment with life is commonplace in the literature of all industrialised countries but that ‘the extreme bitterness with which it is uttered in Scottish writing is remarkable.’ The Reformation was a turning point in Scottish history. At the religious level it signified the end of five hundred years*of dominance by the Roman Church, leaving in its place a unique brand of radical Presbyterian Protestantism. At the political level it broke centuries of close cultural and military links with France and replaced them with even closer, though often very uncomfortable, links with England: links that would lead inexorably to the unification of the crowns of England and Scotland 43 years later, and the Act of Union between England and Scotland 104 years after that. And at the cultural level the Reformation swept away much of the previous five hundred years of human endeavour as radical Protestant iconoclasm turned into an effort to destroy every piece of art, sculpture or architecture in any way associated with the hated “Popery” »

Anent ‘Sunset Song’ (and ‘A Scots Quair’): it has been my wife’s favourite novel and group of novels since she read them first in the 1960s. She was always aware of the violence and brutality which featured in the trilogy. However, this increased her appreciation of the fullness and multi-facetedness of the characterisation. Nor did it make her feel a member of a psychologically damaged nation. On her recommendation, I read it myself during the 1970s and I was aware of the brutality but also about the strength of human spirit as exemplified by Chris Guthrie and others. My late mother who was a contemporary of Mitchell, and herself the victim of a brutal childhood, also read the book after watching the original BBC Scotland series with Vivienne Heilbronn. For her the brutality was very true and matched her experience at the hands of her mother. However, she, too, saw the uplifting passages in the trilogy. The Union is reinforced by the intertribal rivalries of the ‘Four Nations’ in, for example, the fields of sport and culture. In that respect, the UK is a bit like the subdivision of a school into ‘houses’, with each house having its own tribal identity as expressed in its totems and traditions and patriotism.Fine words in defence of the Garden City, not just a town but an ideal, a movement even, with a better life for all as it’s goal.

There is no better description of the way all these young men from small villages went off to fight in a war, which the majority of them didn’t understand, and from which so many never returned. The assertion was that ‘there will soon be no ‘normal’ culture to reinforce a distinctive ‘Scots psyche’ [over and against ‘other’ cultures in our society that could be (and are) deemed ‘non-Scottish’ in relation to that norm]. It would indeed be wonderful if plurality rather than identity became the new cultural norm.What surprised me though was how dogged the remaining agricultural labourers were and the efforts they made to keep up social networks. This spoke to me of deeply felt relationships with neighbours, kinfolk and the land. They loved the land. They had great pride in their work. They were determined to stay and stake out their claim even though they had no hope at all of ever owning a square inch of it.

The same can be said about ‘Frenchness’ or ‘Italianness or ‘Russianness’ as has been said about ‘Scottishness’. The point is not to be dismissive of any discussion of nationality and what it means to be ‘Scottish’ or ‘French’ or Italian’ or Russian’ or whatever; the point is that any contemporary discussion of nationality needs to question how useful the concept of a ‘national psyche’ is in the contemporary world.Faced with a choice between a harsh farming life and the world of books and learning, Chris Guthrie chooses to remain in her rural community, bound by her intense love of the land. But everything changes with the arrival of the First World War and Chris finds her land altered beyond recognition. The Mill of Benholm in Kincardine, which was chosen by the BBC team filming the serial of Sunset Song. Because this man Mitchell wrote under the name of Lewis Grassic Gibbon and, in 1932, published his novel Sunset Song, which is now regarded as one of the crown jewels in literary fiction.

He developed – maybe invented is not too strong – a kind of word music of his own, without becoming as iconoclastic as Hugh MacDiarmid, who was writing poetry at the same time, in which he tried to re-invent a whole lowland Scots language that was consciously set up in opposition to English (which I once heard him describe as “a linguistic disease”, though admittedly he was drunk at the time). Grassic Gibbon’s prose, sometimes glorious, is stamped with individuality: he never seems to be imitating anyone else’s style, but going his own way. Leslie grew up in rural Aberdeenshire and was a profoundly unhappy child. He begins a semi-autobiographical novel, The 13 th Discipline , with the story of how, as a five-year-old child, a boy sets off from home with the express desire ‘to commit suicide’. The same tale was told down our way, only the station was Glasgow Central and the protagonist was an orra man with learning difficulties called ‘Mad Mung’.Most importantly, there is song, ringing out through the natural rustle of wind and bird and harvest, threatening to transform this drama into a musical, that purest of cinematic fantasias (no surprise that Davies cites Seven Brides for Seven Brothers as inspirational). When the Guthrie family move house to accommodate their ever expanding brood, they do so to the strains of Wayfaring Stranger hauntingly sung by Jennifer John. On her wedding night, Chris performs a keening rendition of Flowers of the Forest, the music of which is woven into the very fabric of Grassic Gibbon’s text. Later, Ewan (Kevin Guthrie) sings a few line of Robert Burns’s The Lass That Made the Bed to Me, another song taken directly from the rhapsodic sacred source. Throughout, Davies’s aim remains true. He is perhaps the only film-maker in the world who could stage a tipsy rendition of Ladies of Spain without the slightest hint of a Spielberg reference (it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d never seen Jaws). two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you’d waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you’d cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies. It’s a work that is regularly voted Scotland’s favourite book in public polls, is acclaimed across the world, and remains the most evocative piece of prose ever penned about the Mearns with its message that people will come and go, laugh and cry, live and die, but only the land endures.