Book Review: Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Title: Sunset Song (A Scots Quair #1)
Author: Lewis Grassic Gibbon (pseudonym for James Leslie Mitchell)
Pagecount: 248 (paperback)
Publisher: Polygon
Publishing date: April 9, 2006 (original published 1932)
Goodreads rating mean: 3.98 (161 ratings)
Goodreads rating mode: 5 (39%)
Goodreads rating median: 4
Publisher's summary: 'Oh, she hated and loved in a breath!'
Chris Guthrie's tumultous feelings as she grows up in rural Scotland are the theme of Sunset Song, a national and international success which brought fame to James Leslie Mitchell, better known as 'Lewis Grassic Gibbon'. He brings to life brilliantly the countryside of his youth, a Scotland of small farms, hard life, much affection yet much gossip and spite. In the first few decades of of the twentieth century, heroine Chris grows up, marries, is widowed, and watches her way of life altered beyond recognition by a distant war she barely understands. Yet her strength endures, like the land she loves so intensely.
Warning: my review contains discussions of rape, sexual assault, and domestic abuse.
The Notes section at the end of the book says that the main themes are essentially that modernization is bad, and that war is Hell and changes people, but I really couldn't buy the modernization theme. I feel bad for Chris realizing that her old Scotland was going - but at the end of the book, she's marrying the minister: even if Scotland itself had stayed the same, her experience in it would be greatly changed. The major change her farm of Blawearie experienced was the loss of all the trees, which, yes, was a bad change (according to the Notes section, that part of Scotland is still not fully recovered), but again: she got married and was moving away anyway.
I also thought things were pretty bad to start with, especially in Chris's experience with men. I realize that Scotland was probably no worse than any other part of the world in that time period, and better than some, but it's very uncomfortable to be so close to it. Chris's first sexually charged incident with a man comes when she is a teenager, and she takes food out to the barn where a traveling worker is staying. When she tries to leave, he grabs her leg and offers to deflower her, saying that she wouldn't be the first he's done that for. Now, I find that pretty skeevy, but if it ended there, I wouldn't have minded so much. But it doesn't. Chris goes back inside, and then fantasizes about going back out and what. That's just not something I can wrap my brain around, though it's better than her first encounter with her future husband.
She's walking down the road alone at night and two men come up to her. She kind of recognizes one, though they've never spoken, and he forces a kiss on her, with the implication that he might have done more if Chris's father hadn't come along. Once again, when she gets home, she goes up to her room and fantasizes about it, and later marries him - though to be fair, he was quite possibly drunk or buzzed for that first encounter, and he doesn't try anything similar again, at least not before they're married. Still, remembering this and various rumors passed around the village about him and another woman makes it easier to understand the radical character shift he goes through when returning home on leave from the war later in the book.
There's also a scene at one point where Chris's then-paralyzed father (after her mother's suicide) tries ordering Chris to get all Old Testament with him. Chris just leaves the room (and thankfully doesn't fantasize), which works only because her father is paralyzed. If he wasn't, well, John Guthrie wasn't known for being a good father, considering that he used to beat his oldest son and was implied to be lusting after Chris even before he was paralyzed.
In fact, the existence of John Guthrie weakens the anti-modernization message considerably. He is very much old-school about everything, and I'd say he's at least as bad as Ewan ever is, and worse just by virtue of being around longer. He rapes his wife (okay, marital rape wasn't legally defined back then, but that's what it is) at least twice (and I'm only counting the times he got her pregnant, there were very likely more), eventually leading to her suicide when she realized that she was pregnant again; he would have raped his daughter if he could have; and he beat his son. Ewan is definitely changed for the worse by the war, and I'm not putting him on a pedestal (because he did rape that first night he was home on leave), but I don't think his sudden shift to evil because of exposure to prostitutes and the horrors of war send quite the message Grassic Gibbon intended - especially considering that he wasn't exactly a saint before he left.
Even setting all that aside, I still had some issues with the book. To start with, I have my doubts that there could be a more boring introduction. It's pretty much the entire history of Kinraddie and everyone that lives in it. The reader doesn't meet the main character until page 24, and much of the information given before that is unnecessary, or repeated later in the book.
Secondly, the dialect. I realize that the dialect is a large part of the point of the book, but for someone almost completely unfamiliar with Scots English before this book, it's just too much. Thankfully, there is a glossary, but using it breaks the flow, and this book relies on flow. The author said in the foreword to the first American edition of this book that he hoped the glossary would not be necessary, because the words should be clear by context, and some of them are, though it's still distracting to have to stop and think when you come across one. But there are several words where I would have been lost without the glossary, and at least one that I didn't figure out until I got a chance to check the Internet.
Finally, I just didn't like Chris. I thought she was kind of boring, occasionally creepy, sometimes tolerable, but never particularly likable. She's smart, but decides that's useless for a farmer's daughter and later a farmer's wife. She loves Ewan, and I'm never quite sure why, beyond physical attraction. She hates Ewan, and at least that I understand. She loves Long Rob, which quite frankly comes out of freaking nowhere, and I never understand why, because Grassic Gibbon kills him off with a bare paragraph, just like he does with Chae - my two favorite characters, dead in France.
That's not to say I hated all of the book. It had its good points. Chae telling Chris how Ewan really died was fantastically written and I loved it. I really did like the bit of married life Chris had before Ewan went off to war. I liked most of the scenes Long Rob and Chae were in - especially Long Rob. Once I figured out what most of the words meant, Grassic Gibbons's writing was wonderful (though I never quite got used to the lack of quotation marks).
But overall, this was not a book I would have chosen to pick up, and it's probably not one I'll pick up again.
My rating: 2/5 stars, maybe 2.5 on a generous day. The dialect was a little too strong (and, yes, I know, completely missing the point here), and I really can't get over the fact that I spent a large portion of the book cringing, and not in a good way. However, many of the parts that I could understand that didn't make me cringe were very well-written and even beautiful.
Cross-posted to simply_shipping, books, bookish and the Forgotten Treasures challenge.
Author: Lewis Grassic Gibbon (pseudonym for James Leslie Mitchell)
Pagecount: 248 (paperback)
Publisher: Polygon
Publishing date: April 9, 2006 (original published 1932)
Goodreads rating mean: 3.98 (161 ratings)
Goodreads rating mode: 5 (39%)
Goodreads rating median: 4
Publisher's summary: 'Oh, she hated and loved in a breath!'
Chris Guthrie's tumultous feelings as she grows up in rural Scotland are the theme of Sunset Song, a national and international success which brought fame to James Leslie Mitchell, better known as 'Lewis Grassic Gibbon'. He brings to life brilliantly the countryside of his youth, a Scotland of small farms, hard life, much affection yet much gossip and spite. In the first few decades of of the twentieth century, heroine Chris grows up, marries, is widowed, and watches her way of life altered beyond recognition by a distant war she barely understands. Yet her strength endures, like the land she loves so intensely.
Warning: my review contains discussions of rape, sexual assault, and domestic abuse.
The Notes section at the end of the book says that the main themes are essentially that modernization is bad, and that war is Hell and changes people, but I really couldn't buy the modernization theme. I feel bad for Chris realizing that her old Scotland was going - but at the end of the book, she's marrying the minister: even if Scotland itself had stayed the same, her experience in it would be greatly changed. The major change her farm of Blawearie experienced was the loss of all the trees, which, yes, was a bad change (according to the Notes section, that part of Scotland is still not fully recovered), but again: she got married and was moving away anyway.
I also thought things were pretty bad to start with, especially in Chris's experience with men. I realize that Scotland was probably no worse than any other part of the world in that time period, and better than some, but it's very uncomfortable to be so close to it. Chris's first sexually charged incident with a man comes when she is a teenager, and she takes food out to the barn where a traveling worker is staying. When she tries to leave, he grabs her leg and offers to deflower her, saying that she wouldn't be the first he's done that for. Now, I find that pretty skeevy, but if it ended there, I wouldn't have minded so much. But it doesn't. Chris goes back inside, and then fantasizes about going back out and what. That's just not something I can wrap my brain around, though it's better than her first encounter with her future husband.
She's walking down the road alone at night and two men come up to her. She kind of recognizes one, though they've never spoken, and he forces a kiss on her, with the implication that he might have done more if Chris's father hadn't come along. Once again, when she gets home, she goes up to her room and fantasizes about it, and later marries him - though to be fair, he was quite possibly drunk or buzzed for that first encounter, and he doesn't try anything similar again, at least not before they're married. Still, remembering this and various rumors passed around the village about him and another woman makes it easier to understand the radical character shift he goes through when returning home on leave from the war later in the book.
There's also a scene at one point where Chris's then-paralyzed father (after her mother's suicide) tries ordering Chris to get all Old Testament with him. Chris just leaves the room (and thankfully doesn't fantasize), which works only because her father is paralyzed. If he wasn't, well, John Guthrie wasn't known for being a good father, considering that he used to beat his oldest son and was implied to be lusting after Chris even before he was paralyzed.
In fact, the existence of John Guthrie weakens the anti-modernization message considerably. He is very much old-school about everything, and I'd say he's at least as bad as Ewan ever is, and worse just by virtue of being around longer. He rapes his wife (okay, marital rape wasn't legally defined back then, but that's what it is) at least twice (and I'm only counting the times he got her pregnant, there were very likely more), eventually leading to her suicide when she realized that she was pregnant again; he would have raped his daughter if he could have; and he beat his son. Ewan is definitely changed for the worse by the war, and I'm not putting him on a pedestal (because he did rape that first night he was home on leave), but I don't think his sudden shift to evil because of exposure to prostitutes and the horrors of war send quite the message Grassic Gibbon intended - especially considering that he wasn't exactly a saint before he left.
Even setting all that aside, I still had some issues with the book. To start with, I have my doubts that there could be a more boring introduction. It's pretty much the entire history of Kinraddie and everyone that lives in it. The reader doesn't meet the main character until page 24, and much of the information given before that is unnecessary, or repeated later in the book.
Secondly, the dialect. I realize that the dialect is a large part of the point of the book, but for someone almost completely unfamiliar with Scots English before this book, it's just too much. Thankfully, there is a glossary, but using it breaks the flow, and this book relies on flow. The author said in the foreword to the first American edition of this book that he hoped the glossary would not be necessary, because the words should be clear by context, and some of them are, though it's still distracting to have to stop and think when you come across one. But there are several words where I would have been lost without the glossary, and at least one that I didn't figure out until I got a chance to check the Internet.
Finally, I just didn't like Chris. I thought she was kind of boring, occasionally creepy, sometimes tolerable, but never particularly likable. She's smart, but decides that's useless for a farmer's daughter and later a farmer's wife. She loves Ewan, and I'm never quite sure why, beyond physical attraction. She hates Ewan, and at least that I understand. She loves Long Rob, which quite frankly comes out of freaking nowhere, and I never understand why, because Grassic Gibbon kills him off with a bare paragraph, just like he does with Chae - my two favorite characters, dead in France.
That's not to say I hated all of the book. It had its good points. Chae telling Chris how Ewan really died was fantastically written and I loved it. I really did like the bit of married life Chris had before Ewan went off to war. I liked most of the scenes Long Rob and Chae were in - especially Long Rob. Once I figured out what most of the words meant, Grassic Gibbons's writing was wonderful (though I never quite got used to the lack of quotation marks).
But overall, this was not a book I would have chosen to pick up, and it's probably not one I'll pick up again.
My rating: 2/5 stars, maybe 2.5 on a generous day. The dialect was a little too strong (and, yes, I know, completely missing the point here), and I really can't get over the fact that I spent a large portion of the book cringing, and not in a good way. However, many of the parts that I could understand that didn't make me cringe were very well-written and even beautiful.
Cross-posted to simply_shipping, books, bookish and the Forgotten Treasures challenge.