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A Tale of Scottish Rural Life{{/B}} Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song (1932) was voted "the best Scottish novel of all time" by Scotland's reading public in 2005. Once considered shocking for its frank description of aspects of the lives of Scotland's poor rural farmers, it has been adapted for stage, film, TV and radio in recent decades. The novel is set on the fictional estate of Kinraddie, in the farming country of the Scottish northwest in the years up to and beyond World War Ⅰ. At its heart is the story of Chris, who is both part of the community and a little outside it. Grassic Gibbon gives us the most detailed and intimate account of the life of his heroine (女主人公). We watch her grow through a childhood dominated by her cruel but hard-working father; experience tragedy (her mother's suicide and murder of her twin children); and learn about her feelings as she grows into a woman. We see her marry, lose her husband, then marry again. Chris has seemed so convincing a figure to some female readers that they cannot believe that she is the creation of a man. But it would be misleading to suggest that this book is just about Chris. It is truly a novel of a place and its people. Its opening section tells of Kinraddie's long history, in a language that imitates the place's changing patterns of speech and writing. The story itself is amazingly full of characters and incidents, It is told from Chris' point of view but also from that of the gossiping community, a community where everybody knows everybody else's business and nothing is ever forgotten. Sunset Song has a social theme too. It is concerned with what Grassic Gibbon perceives as the destruction of traditional Scottish rural life first by modernization and then by World War Ⅰ. Gibbon tried hard to show how certain characters resist the war. Despite this, the war takes the young men away, a number of them to their deaths. In particular, it takes away Chris' husband, Ewan Tavendale. The war finally kills Ewan, but not in the way his widow is told. In fact, the Germans aren't responsible for his death, but his own side. He is shot because he is said to have run away from a battle. If the novel is about the end of one way of life it also looks ahead. It is a "Sunset Song" but is concerned too with the new Kinraddie, indeed of the new European world. Grassic Gibbon went on to publish two other novels about the place that continue its story. |