I've given over the last week or ten days to Lewis Grassic Gibbon's A Scots Quair and I'm very pleased to have done so. And I'm embarrassed that I've only now read this strange brooding wondrous series of novels. How could I not have known? For those equally as ignorant as I, the Quair is a trilogy -- Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933) and Grey Granite (1934). Together they tell the story of Christine Guthrie from childhood -- about the turn of the century -- through the years of the Great Depression. I can't remember reading a piece of fiction that has so thoroughly engaged me, or encountering a fictional character so fully realized as Chris Guthrie Tavendale Colquhoun Ogilvie.
Here's a picture of Gibbon (birth name: James Leslie Mitchell) who died at age 34 from a botched surgery.
The novels do for the northeast corner of Scotland what Thomas Hardy did for the southwest of England. Gibbon's corner of Scotland is traditional agrarian society beset by doctrinaire religion, industrialization, war, and the Great Depression. The novels range from extremely brutal to marvelously lyrical. They are not without defect: sometimes too long, often too preachy. Occasionally, I felt that I was being treated to a Scottish version of "orientalism": Scotism, perhaps. The books want condensation, editing; sometimes I felt that I was reading a first draft -- but Gibbon wrote fifteen books in seven years, so signs of haste are inevitable. Gibbon might be called a local colorist or a social realist, but he's much more. His feel for the landscape and for history is unparalleled.
In subject matter and tone, A Scots Quair reminds me most of Halldor Laxness's great Icelandic novel, Independent People. It's also like one of Hardy's Wessex novels, but funnier, more playful, and yes, more sensual. There are stream-of-consciousness speeches that recall Faulkner and passages that might have been written by James Joyce (not the Joyce of Ulysses but the Joyce of Portrait). A much neglected masterpiece.
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