LEWIS GRASSIC GIBBON

Lewis Grassic Gibbon



Lewis Grassic Gibbon

In the early era of the twentieth century, the major cities of Scotland, mainly Glasgow, were the poorest cities of Europe of that time. Away from the urban immorality, however, the rural Scotl also had to suffer from the poorness; the effect of innovation, modernization, industrializations, and; finally, the human and environment cost of war were demolishing the old way of life. Lewis Grassic Gibbon enforced to capture this in his writing A Scots Quair. Sunset Song, is one of the initial novel in this sequence, is a description of the dawdling decline of the Scottish agriculture community, with the small town of Kinraddie helping as a symbol of the great transitions felt in the country. The further novels, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite, tackled the issue of the refuse of belief in the church and the effect of the Great Depression in Scotland, respectively. Gibbon's attempt to defend Scotland in the face of encroach British influence, critic sees this use of the Scot language as his primary weapons (Guptam, Johnson 2005, p.25). Though, Gibbon understood, and portrayal of the shift from tradition Scot to Standard English is nuance, and responsive.

Sunset Song is the most successful, perhaps because it rooted in the land itself, which in turn binds together the personal, social, and mythic dimensions of the novel. The land of the Mearns is dour, red clay; the living wrested from it is hard-won. For all its moods of lyric sweetness, it is the land's harshness that has conditioned the men who work the small farms. It has coarsened them, made them bitter and mean-spirited. Calvinism is a natural religion to John Guthrie, her father. Repelled by what her father has become, the young Chris sees her escape in education (Young 1986, p.69). The harshness and cruelty that characterise the struggle to survive on the farms, and the viciousness and scandal-mongering that mark the life of the community countered by the kindness and generosity of characters like Long Rob of the Mill and Chae Strachan and the hard beauty of the land itself. Writing in his essay on ``The Land'' he said of the northern harvest that it is ``harder and slower ... and lovelier in its austerity.'' Chris torn between an ``English Chris'' who hates this life, and a ``Scottish Chris'' who loves it. In the end, it is the land that wins, but the book is elegiac; the way of life she chooses is dying the war brings it to an end. It is in that sense that the novel is a sunset song.

Throughout the trilogy, Gibbon employs two interesting technical devices. The first is highly original: use of a second-person narrator. It can be the voice of the community, expressing communal hopes, fears, and delights, or, used satirically, can give the measure of its depravity as it criticises, judges, and gossips. At other times, it carries Chris's inner life, but view with the objectivity that moving out of the first person ...