Book and film review, by Hugh Arbuthnott

Sunset Song

By Lewis Grassic Gibbon

“Lewis Grassic Gibbon was born James Leslie Mitchell at the dawn of the twentieth century in 1901 in Aberdeenshire. Spending most of his childhood in Arbuthnott, a farming community in the Mearns, his family and community's tie to the land was to create a love-hate relationship between this area and the writer which lasted until his early death in 1935.”

This passage is taken from the beginning of a BBC article from a series on its website about Scottish writing. It is a good article about the author and in particular about his trilogy A Scots Quair (quair means book) of which Sunset Song is the first volume and thought generally to be the best of the three. It is certainly the most read and was voted Best Scottish Book of All Time at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2006. The other two books are called Cloud Howe and Grey Granite. I should explain here that, in the quote above, the BBC refers  to Aberdeenshire  but in 1901 the area was in Kincardineshire, also known as The Mearns (see the entry for Kincardineshire in Wikipedia).

The story of Sunset Song is of a girl called Chris Guthrie who was born and brought up on the fictional farming estate of Kinraddie, which presumably is loosely based on the Arbuthnott estate and Arbuthnott village where Mitchell first went to school. Life is hard for the tenant farmers and Chris grows up in a community whose farms are frequently hit by disasters, natural or man-made. Her father is a hard man, a patriarch who orders his family about and beats his son for disobeying him while reducing his wife to a “breeding sow” who commits suicide by poisoning herself and her most recent twin babies when she finds she is pregnant again.

When her father dies, Chris marries a local boy, Ewan Taverner, has a baby and faming life continues until the outbreak of war in 1914 when Ewan joins the army. Before going to France, he returns from his training camp, drunk, belligerent and demanding.  Chris is appalled and turns her back on him when he departs at the end of his leave. The next news she has of him is that he has been killed in France but it turns out that he has been shot for desertion – seeking to escape back to the Mearns and the smells of the countryside he knew so well – and perhaps to Chris also. 

The book is written in a version of the Kincardineshire dialect, with some of the spelling changed to make it easier to understand by any English-speaker. The prose is breathless and poetic. The most important message in the book is that everything changes except the land and the seasons. The film, directed by Terence Davies, has tried to capture all these qualities, although he hasn’t tried to force all the actors to stick closely to the dialect.  There are some superb shots of the countryside but it isn’t clear whether it is indeed Kincardineshire or New Zealand where some of the filming took place. This allowed the director to film the farming folk tripping far too often through ripe, waving corn (about which no farmer would have been at all happy) although it was winter in Britain when filming was under way. Parts were also filmed  in Luxembourg, perhaps because some of the financing, which Davies found it difficult to get together, came from the Luxembourg Film Fund. The film lasts for two and a quarter hours which is too long; the director often indulged himself in long, lingering shots of fields, forests and views of interiors. He has here indeed been faithful to the book but somehow the written descriptions are more readable than the film’s meanderings are watchable. Where he was less true to the book, I felt, was in a sequence showing Ewan’s last hours before he is taken out and shot, an episode which is given far more prominence than in the book; perhaps Davies wanted to show how horrific he found the shooting of deserters in WWI, while the author’s treatment of the episode implies that Ewan should have expected nothing else.

The acting was good. Agyness Deyn, a former model who is a relative newcomer to films, played Chris Guthrie and very well. Peter Mullan is her father and although some of the reviews I have read say he plays a stereotype of other recent roles he has had, we hadn’t seen him before and thought he got it right.

Vanessa and I were glad to have seen the film. Of course, this was partly for personal reasons but also because it is a book which I have long admired. If you are ever up in that part of the world, it is worth visiting the Lewis Grassic Gibbon Centre in Arbuthnott village to learn more about the author and the locality. The village is just south of Stonehaven, between Aberdeen and Montrose.

Hugh Arbuthnott

3 Jan 2016