Is it meant to make us less unenthusiastic about the promise of being ruled by Boris Johnson and King Charles? Because, you know, Scotland is just rubbish, you only have to focus on the negative aspects of one of its favourite books written only 100 years ago. But I do know that I – and I suspect many Scots – found in her something of myself and what it meant to be Scottish; and that she helped me make sense of the conflicts and choices my teenage self was grappling with. I understood through her the love/hate – but ultimately love – relationship with the land that many of us feel. Through Chris, I could give expression to the feelings that stirred in me as I looked across the field and out to the sea from my grandparents’ croft on the west coast of Scotland – dreaming of going to university in the ‘big city’, but knowing that part of my soul would always belong there. Chris also helped me understand the inferiority complex that working-class Scots can sometimes feel, worried that our way of speaking isn’t the ‘proper English’ we hear on the television, but also knowing that it is the best and purest way of expressing who we are. It’s also now a politically dangerous concept. Part of the danger is that we interpret ‘other’ cultures from the point of view of the culture we regard as ‘normal’. Thus, we identify Gaelic or English as the common languages that reinforce ‘the Scots psyche’, even though many Scots nowadays have neither Gaelic nor English as their first language. Likewise, we identify the historical heritage that reinforces ‘the Scots psyche’ with that of Wallace, Knox, and Burns, even though many Scots nowadays don’t have any of that as their cultural inheritance. The danger is that Scots who don’t conform to the ‘normal’ psychological profile or archetype are excluded as ‘Scots’. And anybody who watched television in Scotland in the 1970s will recall Vivien Heilbron in Bill Craig’s adaptation of the Lewis Grassic Gibbon novel, which was brought to the big screen by acclaimed director Terence Davies in 2015 with Peter Mullan, Agyness Deyn and Kevin Guthrie in the lead roles. And do we really need to be so terrified of talking about Scots from the past who have made a contribution, in case this makes someone feel ‘excluded’.

Chris Guthrie is the most passionate and appealing heroine in Scottish literature; Grassic Gibbon’s magnificent novel is fresh, powerful and timeless” Sunset Song is profound. It is heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting and life affirming. It tells a story of a Scotland that, in some senses, is no more, yet, in others, still lives in the hearts of each and every one of us. In a flash it had come on him, he had wakened up, he was daft and a fool to be there; and, like somebody minding things done in a coarse wild dream there had flashed on him memory of Chris at Blawearie and his last days there, mad and mad he had been… It’s a work that is regularly voted Scotland’s favourite book in public polls, is acclaimed across the world, and remains the most evocative piece of prose ever penned about the Mearns with its message that people will come and go, laugh and cry, live and die, but only the land endures.

But, for all that, it was Chris Guthrie that gave Sunset Song the place in my heart that it still occupies today. I am genuinely not sure if it is true or a stretch to say, as many do, that the Chris of Sunset Song – and the two subsequent novels that make up the Scots Quair trilogy – personifies Scotland. As the heroine Chris Guthrie, one of the strongest female characters in the world of literature, Vivien Heilbron was tough and she was tender; feisty and flirtatious; intelligent and intuitive. An unforgettable evocation of a way of life that has slipped away … It is a love song for a landscape and language still familiar – and precious – to a generation born long after [Grassic-Gibbon] died … Chris is one of the great women of 20th-century fiction”

As you enjoy it, I invite you to marvel at this. It is said that Lewis Grassic Gibbon (just thirty-three years of age when he died, even younger than that other Scottish genius Robert Burns at the time of his death) wrote this masterpiece in six weeks. In doing so, he gifted us one of the finest literary accomplishments Scotland has ever known. But I am sure I am not the only person who was absolutely aghast at the appalling contribution of this author in 2014. But that I say it still, more than thirty years and hundreds of great books later, demands more examination. The last sentence with its references to cultural fear and (self) loathing may explain that persistent Scots psychological cringe.Outsiders’ perceptions can help jolt us out of cultural blindness. In 1989 the German academic Peter Zenzinger published an essay on contemporary Scottish fiction which is telling. He notes that disenchantment with life is commonplace in the literature of all industrialised countries but that ‘the extreme bitterness with which it is uttered in Scottish writing is remarkable.’ My conclusion is that the love I feel for Sunset Song is not just an appreciation of its considerable literary quality; it is as much, maybe more so, a reflection of the profound impact it had on me at a formative time of my life. The Reformation was a turning point in Scottish history. At the religious level it signified the end of five hundred years*of dominance by the Roman Church, leaving in its place a unique brand of radical Presbyterian Protestantism. At the political level it broke centuries of close cultural and military links with France and replaced them with even closer, though often very uncomfortable, links with England: links that would lead inexorably to the unification of the crowns of England and Scotland 43 years later, and the Act of Union between England and Scotland 104 years after that. And at the cultural level the Reformation swept away much of the previous five hundred years of human endeavour as radical Protestant iconoclasm turned into an effort to destroy every piece of art, sculpture or architecture in any way associated with the hated “Popery” »

In a flash it had come on him, he had wakened up, he was daft and a fool to be there; and, like somebody minding things done in a coarse wild dream there had flashed on him memory of Chris at Blawearie and his last days there, mad and mad he had been ... I was from Glasgow so I had to learn to speak the (Doric) language, because it was so important, but some of the cast were from the north-east and they helped me in every way they could. I assume you would be equally dismissive of any attempt to discuss “Frenchness” or “Italianness” or “Russianness” on the basis that any such discussion must inevitably lead to “exclusion”.’ That’s a terribly anglocentric thing to say. By virtue of the same argument, anyone who wanted to affirm or deny something written by a Scot who doesn’t write in English, but who writes in Gaelic or Urdu (say), would require literacy in Gaelic or Urdu. Why should English be privileged over any of contemporary Scotland’s other languages? Ach Carol, whit a shame so many Bella voices get swept up in nonsense – like the precise status of Welwyn Garden City – rather than your perceptive words. Words which have helped me better understand Sunset Song. It has certainly been my favourite Scots novel since I first read it many decades ago – when I was a teenager.He lived with no rights whatsoever, as all tenant farmers did, and woe betide the man who failed to doff his cap. This has had a massive negative effect not only on farmers but also their workers who depended on them. Kinraddie, the book’s fictional setting, also represents a world in transition.The rural practices and way of life that the story’s characters have always known are increasingly challenged by advancing technology and the impact of war. A central theme of the book is the passing of the ‘old Scotland’, a theme powerfully articulated towards the end as the minister unveils a memorial to the parish’s war dead:

Because this man Mitchell wrote under the name of Lewis Grassic Gibbon and, in 1932, published his novel Sunset Song, which is now regarded as one of the crown jewels in literary fiction. Of course, in so many ways, the lives and experiences of the characters in Sunset Song are worlds away from my own. I grew up in a very different place and time. The harshness of rural life in the years leading up to and through the First World War was beyond my direct ken. That, though, is part of the appeal. The book quite literally introduced me to a part of my own country – Aberdeenshire – that until then had been as alien to me as a foreign land. It opened my ears to a language – an echo of the speak of the Mearns – that was of my country, but not really mine. It seeded in me a fascination and deep affection for the names, places and people of the North East of Scotland. To this day, a journey to Aberdeen past the road signs for the towns and villages of the Mearns always makes me think of Sunset Song – of Kinraddie, Blawearie, Peesie’s Knapp.Years later Mitchell dedicated his exhaustive analysis of the history of the Mayan civilisation to his headmaster, Mr Alexander Gray of Echt. Sunset Song tells a beautiful, though often heartbreaking, story. Set in the north-east of Scotland around the outbreak of the First World War, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel is unsparing in its harsh realism. Crushing poverty, the toil of earning a living from the land, the sternness of religion and the oppressive reality of life for women in particular – these themes provide the context for the lives whose stories unfold in the book. Another part of the danger lies in our reluctance to ‘give up’ our normal. Then we get into fights about ‘our’ national identity and its perceived dilution by ‘foreign incomers’, and ‘national movements’ of people sharing ‘national’ beliefs and aspirations. The light fades on a way of life that is now changed utterly, but the song can still be heard. For anyone who grew up, as I did, in north-east Scotland in the rural hinterland of Aberdeen, the first novel in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy A Scots Quair is an unforgettable evocation of a way of life that has slipped away (taking much with it that we’re well rid of). At the same time, it is a love song for a landscape and language still familiar – and precious – to a generation born long after he died. How could anyone read sunset song and talk about the brutality of john guthrie, a tenant farmer without mentioning the brutality of the tenure he existed under?