But he caves to the merciless taunting by fellow farmers and laborers of his supposed “cowardice” and enlists. World War I erupts, and Ewan for a time avoids joining up. They live happily and have a son, little Ewan.

Chris marries Ewan Tavendale, the foreman at one of the larger crofts. When John dies, Chris must choose between continuing her education and becoming a teacher or sticking with the land. Chris farms alone and cares for her crippled father, who is not too ill to continue to pester Chris but is too ill to carry out his intent. Shortly thereafter, John suffers a stroke. Will elopes with a local girl, and the couple emigrate to Argentina. He makes incestuous advances upon Chris, who locks and blocks her door. He continues to farm Blawearie with Chris and her brother Will, whom he alternatively mocks and beats.

John Guthrie hands over two young sons to be adopted by his sister. Jean Guthrie kills herself and her twin babies. The family is headed by a stern, abusive father, who literally kills his wife by invoking God to impregnate her with a seventh child, causing her to break. Gibbon limns particularly well the brutalities confronted by farm women: never-ending domestic duties and field duties, painful pushing out of babes (or bairns) seemingly ceaselessly, and the daily prospect of physical and sexual abuse from a soused husband or sexual assault from field workers or the lusty minister.Ĭhris Guthrie lives with her family on a farm called Blawearie on the Kinraddie Estate. He does not spare us from the dark side and contradictions of the rural world: back-breaking toil and the joy of coaxing life from the soil, beautiful landscapes and harsh bone-chilling weather, neighbors who are nosy and judgmental but who combine to forge a generous community, a life lived at a level barely above poverty, subject to whims of nature and the landlord’s search for profit. What spares Sunset Song from the sentimentality discolorations of Gone With The Wind is Gibbon’s honesty. It is a eulogy of and an elegy to the life of the crofters, small tenant farmers, a life that vanished following World War I as the Scots language, traditions, and folk songs gave way to English, global culture, commercial farming, and modern technology. The trilogy declines steeply from there, but Sunset Song was so powerful, and Chris Guthrie such a compelling character, that I was powerless to do anything other than to read the next two books. Sunset Song is considered a Scottish classic and is a staple of the school curriculum. The trilogy portrays the life of Chris Guthrie, the daughter and wife of a crofter living in the Mearns, a county on the northeast coast of Scotland, in the early twentieth century. A Scottish Quair is a trilogy comprised of the novels Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933), and Grey Granite (1934).

Lewis grassic gibbon a scots quair