A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

First published: 1946 (includes Sunset Song, 1932; Cloud Howe, 1933; and Grey Granite, 1934)

Type of work: Social and domestic chronicle

Time of work: From a few years before World War I through the Great Depression

Locale: Northeastern Scotland

Principal Characters:

• Chris Guthrie, whose life the trilogy traces from childhood to middle age
• John Guthrie, Chris’s father, a crofter (farmer)
• Jeanne Guthrie, Chris’s mother
• Will Guthrie, Chris’s brother
• Ewan Tavendale, a young crofter, Chris’s first husband
• Charles (Chae) Strahan, a crofter and friend of Chris and Ewan
• Robert Duncan (Long Rob of the Mill), a miller and friend of Chris and Ewan
• Young Ewan Tavendale, the son of Chris and Ewan
• Robert Colquohoun, a minister, Chris’s second husband
• Ake Ogilvie, a joiner and sometime poet, Chris’s third husband
• Ma Cleghorn, a boardinghouse owner and friend of Chris
• Ellen Johns, young Ewan’s lover

The Novels

Sunset Song, the first novel in the trilogy A Scots Quair, is certainly the best known and perhaps the most finely crafted of the three books. The reader becomes acquainted with Chris Guthrie as a young girl growing up on a small farm near Kinraddie. At an early age, she is a Chris divided (as Scotland is being divided): an English Chris and a Scottish Chris; a Chris who loves books and learning and culture and a Chris who loves the land and the sky and the roll of the seasons. This ongoing personal and social struggle is at the soul of all three novels.

After being sent to school and entertaining dreams of continuing her education and becoming a schoolteacher, Chris falls in love with and marries a young local crofter, Ewan Tavendale. With this decision, she realizes that she is happiest when she is working with the land and the natural world, and she settles into a nearly idyllic pastoral life with Ewan. In time, they have a son, and as they rear him and harvest their meager crops, they become detachedly aware of the approaching war. Determined to maintain their hard but safe life, they claim that the war and the outside world will have no effect on them, but in time, as friends enlist and are killed, and even the sheltering woods are cut down to provide for the war effort, Ewan himself angrily enlists. The war, so antithetical to his life and very nature, brutalizes Ewan until he is changed virtually beyond Chris’s recognition. Ultimately, he is shot as a deserter when he tries simply to walk away from the insanity and madness around him.

Chris’s world is shattered, but she accepts her fate and finds healing with the help of her friends and the new young minister, Robert Colquohoun, whom she marries at the end of the novel. Their story continues in the second book, Cloud Howe.

The end of the war does not bring an end to social injustice in Scotland and the bitter inequities of the class system. In Cloud Howe, Chris and Robert move from the small farming community of Kinraddie to a larger parish in nearby Segget. Robert has come home from the war wounded but zealous to fight the battle for social equity. This new war is the main focus of the novel, and while the reader sees Robert primarily through Chris’s eyes, he is, in fact, the central character in Cloud Howe. Robert’s continuing spiral into futility and depression is chronicled in his repeated and varying attempts to bring about change, first by example, then by attempting to convince men to change their character, and finally by helping to organize strikes and conduct marches. Chris’s life is fairly static as she rears young Ewan and longs for another child with Robert. Basically a nonbeliever, she nevertheless supports Robert in his Christian calling while remaining uninvolved herself. Eventually, the longed-for pregnancy occurs, but Chris’s one act of aid for Robert’s cause, a rainy-night search to warn him and his fellow strikers of potential physical harm, results in a tragic miscarriage and a long illness for Chris. Robert is plunged into deep despair, and his moods turn unalterably darker; he shuts Chris out of his life both emotionally and sexually.

Robert becomes convinced that social activism is ultimately pointless after Christ appears to him to tell him that His Second Coming is at hand. As Robert’s health declines (in part as a result of his war injuries), he becomes more and more detached and visionary. He is jarred back to reality when a parishioner’s baby is badly mauled by rats, and he realizes that, for the poor, waiting one more day for the Second Coming could be too long. After a physically exhausting bicycle ride in the cold night to be with the baby’s family, he goes home to write a flaming sermon on social injustice and dies in the pulpit as he is delivering it. Once again, Chris’s safe world comes crashing down around her, and the novel ends with Chris out walking in the brae, contemplating the changes that must now come to her life, the shape of which she cannot know.

As Grey Granite begins, Chris’s son, young Ewan Tavendale, has moved to the city of Duncairn, and Chris has followed him there. Her life revolves around the boardinghouse where she lives and Ma Cleghorn, the earthy, kindly owner for whom Chris works to support herself. Days flow into weeks of grinding work as Chris cleans and scrubs and cooks for the various other rather unpleasant tenants. In time, they are joined by Ake Ogilvie from Segget, who, along with others from poor, outlying areas, comes to Duncairn looking for a better job and a better life.

Ewan is also a boarder, employed at a local factory. His hopes for higher education and a profession ended with Robert’s death, and he works hard by the side of the keelies whose lower-class lives have always destined them for physical labor. Ewan is distant and stiffly polite to his coworkers, and his airs eventually get him into a serious fight with one of the young men. Though injured, Ewan defends himself well, earning the others’ respect while learning that there is much to admire about the keelies. His friendships with them deepen, and, mixed with the Socialist upbringing he experienced under Robert, Ewan finds himself becoming a Socialist. Caught between the gentry and the Communist movement, he attempts to form a league of young workers that would address the grievances of the lower classes with more moderation than his Communist friends have to offer. In time, however, as Ewan becomes the center of the story, he turns wholeheartedly to Communism as the solution to the ills of the life around him, rejecting all worldly pleasures for himself, including the love of his fellow Socialist, schoolteacher Ellen Johns. By the end of Grey Granite, he is a radical convert.

Chris’s life, at the same time, has taken a very different turn. When Ma Cleghorn dies, Chris again faces a homeless future. She agrees to strike a deal with Ake Ogilvie, who will buy the boardinghouse from the Cleghorn heir if Chris will marry him. Theirs is a loveless marriage, but Chris endures it with stoic kindness as Ake unsuccessfully searches for work. Ake eventually leaves Chris and Scotland for the promise of a better life in Canada.

Deserted by jobless or disillusioned boarders, Chris leaves Duncairn for the small farmstead where she was born, near Echt. The pull of the land brings her from the city back to her roots, where she briefly is seen caring for the crops until, in an enigmatic ending, she melds completely with the land she so loves.

The Characters

Chris Guthrie is the heart of A Scotts Quair and is one of the most finely wrought characters in modern fiction. In her is shown not only the human struggle to come to terms with one’s own reality but also the struggle of a nation for its very soul. Lewis Grassic Gibbon has created a “real” woman, rare for a male writer, and more remarkable in this trilogy because much of the narrative is recounted from Chris’s perspective. Her very thoughts are put on the page, and they invariably ring true. Gibbon’s physical description of his protagonist varies little from beginning to end, and while there are touches of gray in the golden hair at the end of Grey Granite, the physical Chris remains tall and strong, long-legged and fair. Between latent periods when she simply revels in life and the living of it, she searches for that which makes her real. She dreams, only to give up the dream when confronted with irrevocable reality. Rather than choosing her destiny, she uses the results of that destiny to show her the truth in her soul and character, a very feminine trait. She is a strong woman, flawed but ultimately wise.

In a reference to “Chris Caledonia,” Gibbon makes it clear that on a deeper level, Chris is also Scotland, a country in search of its true identity in the early 1900’s. It is important to see Chris this way, but equally crucial to see the wonderfully human character Gibbon has created.

All the other characters pale by comparison to Chris. None is as finely crafted or made as fully known to the reader. Each is important, however, for what he or she brings to Chris’s personal growth and for what he or she represents.

John and Jeanne Guthrie are Chris’s past. Her mother is a happy, easy-going woman, full of compassion and understanding, who is ultimately broken by the hard farm life with John Guthrie and the multiple pregnancies forced upon her by his religious fervor. Finding herself pregnant for the sixth time, her strength and energy spent, she takes the lives of her two small twins and then kills herself. It is from her that Chris inherits her golden hair and her zest for the natural world.

Life also breaks John, who as a young man is kind and generous but who grows hard and cold through years of tilling the stony land. He turns more and more to his religion, until its harsh Calvinism rules his life and his associations with all those around him. After his wife’s death, his lustful ragings terrify Chris, and only after his death does she come to accept why he became the man that he was.

Ewan Tavendale is Chris’s only real love, and they share a joyous physical and emotional relationship. Ewan is the complete crofter, one who represents all the earthy goodness of Scotland’s peasant past. Destroyed by the war, he represents also the death of a way of life.

In Charles “Chae” Strahan and Robert Duncan, called Long Rob of the Mill, Gibbon presents counterparts to Ewan and Chris. It is to Chae that Ewan confesses his desertion from the army and to whom he entrusts the task of relaying the truth of that event to Chris, including Ewan’s undying love for her. In Rob, Chris has a soul mate, and one could logically see him as Chris’s spouse. He, too, however, is killed in the war in France, but not until after he and Chris share a night of lovemaking in the fields he has helped her harvest.

Robert Colquohoun represents both figuratively and literally the Church in Scotland at the turn of the century and its absolute inability to produce, at least in Gibbon’s eyes, any effective forces for justice and good. Robert’s most effective role is one that he himself hardly notices, that of stepfather to Ewan, who ultimately carries on for the dead social activist.

As a husband and as a character, Ake Ogilvie is not significant, except as he symbolizes Chris’s decaying idealism and the dying social system of Duncairn. He is an obvious representative of the Scots who abandon their motherland altogether.

Young Ewan Tavendale is perhaps overdrawn as cold, hard, like gray granite. He is the future of Scotland, however, the force for change, the voice of the common man in the face of adversity. By the end of the concluding novel, he is singularly symbolic, almost a caricature rather than a character, so immersed is he in the cause of the Communist revolution.

Critical Context

A Scots Quair is universally regarded as an epic achievement in depicting the death of a small rural Scottish community and the life of a girl grown to womanhood amid a crumbling social and economic structure. It is still widely read in Scotland and is achieving a degree of recognition abroad, in part because of the televising of the dramatized version of Sunset Song and the wider availability of the paperback edition.

Written toward the end of Gibbon’s life, the novels vividly convey his view of peasant life, and, whether right or wrong, his personal biases concerning the culture and society in which he lived. The popularity of A Scots Quair has caused it to overshadow other of Gibbon’s fine works but has also opened the world and writings of this important Scottish author to a far broader reading public.

Bibliography

Campbell, Ian. Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 1985.

Gifford, Douglas. Neil M. Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 1983.

Malcom, William K. A Blasphemer and Reformer: A Study of James Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 1984.

Young, Douglas F. Beyond the Sunset: A Study of James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon), 1973.