Profile: Sunset Song finally comes to the big screen

Such is the buzz about the movie, which stars Agyness Deyn and Peter Mullan, that it is already being tipped as a prize winner at next month’s London Film Festival, while its British release date is being brought forward to capitalise on the publicity that will be attracted in Canada and London.

THE NOVEL – SCOTLAND’S BEST?

REGULARLY hailed as the people of Scotland’s favourite novel, Sunset Song is the first of a trilogy based in the north east of the country.

Written by journalist and former RAF clerk James Leslie Mitchell under his pseudonym Lewis Grassic Gibbon (from his mother’s maiden name), the trilogy is called A Scots Quair.

The books caused a moral scandal when published in the early 1930s, as they dealt in a quite revolutionary, lyrical, and often humorous manner with themes of love, sex, religion, class warfare, politics and death.

The novels are set in the farmland of the Mearns and in the nearby industrial town of Duncairn, and feature a memorable central character, Chris Guthrie, who grows from adolescence to widowhood (twice) over the course of the three books, the others being Cloud Howe and Grey Granite.

Sunset Song is by far the best known of the trilogy and tells Chris’s tale as a teenager growing up on the Kinraddie estate of the Mearns, or Kincardineshire, where Mitchell was himself brought up in the village of Arbuthnott – there is a historical centre in his memory in the village.

A free spirit, Chris is a highly intelligent girl who thrives on literature and loves not wisely but well. The people of the Mearns rejected the book at first because, as one critic put it, Sunset Song is “drenched in sex.”

It is not explicit by modern standards, but we come to know that Chris Guthrie has a passion for the men in her life and, above all, for the land that surrounds her. In passages of beautiful dialect unsurpassed in Scottish literature, Mitchell puts into her mind thoughts of nature that capture all our imaginations – she speaks as ‘Scottish Chris’, while her more reserved self is English Chris.

The dichotomy between her intellectual self and her earthy nature is one of the great themes of the novel. For instance, there is a memorable scene in which Chris examines her growing teenager’s body in a mirror. Her description was so convincing that at first, many women readers thought Gibbon was the nom de plume of a female writer. Yet Mitchell is definitely a man who sees his fellow men through a glass darkly. Almost all the male characters have flaws, some of them deep, and most meet tragic ends.

Nor is the author sparing of his main female character in the slightest – he gives her a tragic first great love in the shape of farmer Ewan Tavendale, who becomes the father of her son Ewan. Tavendale is a Highlander who ends up being shot for desertion during the Great War.

Chris also endures the attempts at incest by her disturbed father John (played by Peter Mullan, right, in the 2015 version), not long after she barely survives the trauma of her mother’s suicide.

Is it any wonder that Chris chooses to sing that powerful Scottish lament Flowers Of The Forest at her wedding to Ewan?

THE SEQUELS

IT was not easy being Chris Guthrie in Sunset Song, and at the start of Cloud Howe we see her make the wrong choice for her second husband – local kirk minister Robert Colquhoun. After being gassed in the war, he is already suffering from the lung malady that will kill him a few years later.

Chris also suffers the miscarriage of their child, and in her new community of Segget – small town life described with biting acidity and accuracy by Mitchell – she is forced to confront ‘bitchcraft and witchcraft’, as one modern critic put it, not least because Colquhoun’s liberal politics put him at odds with the locals. His death during a sermon would be risible in the hands of a lesser writer.

Following Chris as she moves to the nearby city of Duncairn – Mitchell was emphatic that it is not based on Aberdeen or Dundee, but don’t be fooled - Grey Granite is not an easy book for anyone who thinks that it will follow the language of Sunset Song and touch on similar themes.

On the contrary, it is a grim recounting of the struggle of workers to survive in a dehumanised industrial urban sprawl. Chris becomes more of a commentator as the action is led by her son Ewan who becomes a political activist in the mould of a John MacLean or John Wheatley.

It is Mitchell at his most socialist, but in truth, no matter his motivation, neither sequel is a patch on Sunset Song.

SO WHY DON’T WE KNOW MORE ABOUT MITCHELL/GIBBON?

WE lost sight of the creator of A Scots Quair largely because he had the misfortune to die as soon as the last of the trilogy was published.

Mitchell had tried various fiction genres early in his career, and had won acclaim from HG Wells for his science fiction, but it was only in his own authentic ‘speak of the Mearns’ that he found his true voice. Yet that very quality of authenticity repelled many readers, even though he was championed by the likes of Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid.

He wrote short stories such as Smeddum, and some historical novels such as Spartacus, but A Scots Quair was by far his finest and most important work.

In 1935, the year after Grey Granite’s publication, Mitchell died of peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer. He was just six days short of his 34th birthday.

THE BBC VERSIONS

THOSE who have seen it will never have forgotten the BBC’s magical production of Sunset Song in 1971. Starring the luminous Vivien Heilbron as Chris Guthrie (pictured left) – she would reprise the role in the BBC adaptations of Cloud Howe and Grey Granite – the series captivated the television-viewing public.

A later adaptation for radio by that great unsung heroine of modern Scottish culture, Gerda Stevenson, was a triumph.

Stevenson’s verdict on Sunset Song encapsulates its appeal perfectly: “As a reader, one can return to Sunset Song again and again, finding more and more layers, and be utterly drawn into its world every time. I never fail to read this novel without grieving for the loss of its people, and their way of life.”

THE NEW FILM

THE 40th Toronto Film Festival will host the World Premiere, but expect a great deal more publicity when it opens in London next month. Agyness Deyn may not be most people’s first choice as Chris Guthrie, but she is apparently up to the task of starring opposite Peter Mullan as John Guthrie, the role of the troubled patriarch being tailor-made for Mullan. Talk of awards for him may be premature, but he will likely deserve them.

Writer and director Terence Davies is best known for Distant Voices, Still Lives, set in his native Liverpool, and the critically-lauded The Deep Blue Sea.

All concerned appear to know how important the novel is to Scots and lovers of literature everywhere. We will soon know if they have carried off the task of putting life in the Mearns on the big screen.