In the third chapter, John dies. Guthrie comes into possession of his wealth and property. Despite an urge to sell the land and move on from it, she resolves to take care of Blawearie as her own project in homage to her roots. She falls in love with a working-class man Ewan Tavendale. Soon, he proposes to her, and she accepts with little hesitation. Not long after their marriage, she learns that she is pregnant. How should Scotland distinguish itself, for example, from England, New Zealand, or even more challenging, from Ireland, if not by its uniqueness or ‘psyche’?’

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.’ The central character is a young woman, Chris Guthrie, growing up in a farming family in the fictional parish of Kinraddie in the Mearns at the start of the 20th century. Life is hard, and her family is dysfunctional. 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 grand-parents’ 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 “proper English”, but also knowing that it is the best and purest way of expressing who we are. 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”.’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?

But, for all that, it was Chris Guthrie that gave the novel 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. One of the comments above suggests the important point that what Gibbon was seeing is an east of Scotland more than a west of Scotland feature. While that would be hard to establish objectively, I think the east-west divide has roots deep in the nature of the land. The fact that the east is mostly fertile agricultural soil long made it a magnet for consolidated feudal power, based on coercion and the normalisaiton of violence. That’s not to say that there wasn’t also violence on the west coast. There was plenty, and brutally so like the Eigg massacre. But this was more within an indigenous framework where matters were easier to process locally through time – a case more of lateral violence (equitably, from the side) than vertical violence (from top down, and hard to engage with, thereby the pressure spilling out laterally). In the west, indigenous communities could be more themselves for longer because, until the Cheviot came in and the clearances began, the land was not worth grabbing and settling in for anything much other than subsistence. I suspect that in the west with Iona etc., Christian influence was also stronger, and the bardic tradition that it built on carried a kind of immunity in conflict that gave the culuture richer roots through which reconciliations might be effected. The first in a trilogy called A Scots Quair, Scottish author Lewis Gibbon’s novel Sunset Song (1932) follows a young Scot Chris Guthrie who is raised in a dysfunctional farming family in Kinraddie, a fictitious estate in Scotland’s northeast, Kincardineshire. Guthrie has a difficult life, punctuated by the larger geopolitical crisis of World War I. Gibbon develops his own mythology for this fictional Scottish place, embedding its events and characters in an allegory that points to Scotland’s crisis of identity during the war and postwar periods. For its deep characterization of the social and emotional texture of Scotland, the novel has become a household staple for Scots and has been entered into both the Scottish and Anglophone canons. Fine words in defence of the Garden City, not just a town but an ideal, a movement even, with a better life for all as it’s goal.It’s not your intentions I am questioning, Mike. I am fairly comfortable that you are not longing for Boris to survive to be joint king with Charles. Over the past few years, my duties as First Minister have taken me to First World War centenary commemorations in Arras, Amiens and the Somme. I have heard and been humbled by the real-life stories of those who fought, died and survived. And yet so often I’ve found myself thinking about the fictional Ewan Tavendale; about how the war brutalised him, turning his happy marriage to Chris into a nightmare of abuse and contempt. And about how, far away in a field in France, he had suddenly come to his senses, overcome by the futility of it all: There does not seem to have been any previous contributions to Bella from this author. Just a plug for two books. Of course, in so many ways, the lives and experiences of the book’s characters are worlds away from my own. 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. One can make a case for other Scottish books, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Muriel Spark, the collected poems of Robert Burns or more recent authors.

Anent ‘Sunset Song’ (and ‘A Scots Quair’): it has been my wife’s favourite novel and group of novels since she read them first in the 1960s. She was always aware of the violence and brutality which featured in the trilogy. However, this increased her appreciation of the fullness and multi-facetedness of the characterisation. Nor did it make her feel a member of a psychologically damaged nation. On her recommendation, I read it myself during the 1970s and I was aware of the brutality but also about the strength of human spirit as exemplified by Chris Guthrie and others. My late mother who was a contemporary of Mitchell, and herself the victim of a brutal childhood, also read the book after watching the original BBC Scotland series with Vivienne Heilbronn. For her the brutality was very true and matched her experience at the hands of her mother. However, she, too, saw the uplifting passages in the trilogy. The town, an experiment if making a better world for the working class would be attractive not to mention a contrast to the world he wrote about in Sunset Song. 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’. Chris Guthrie is the most passionate and appealing heroine in Scottish literature; Grassic Gibbon’s magnificent novel is fresh, powerful and timeless”Most importantly, there is song, ringing out through the natural rustle of wind and bird and harvest, threatening to transform this drama into a musical, that purest of cinematic fantasias (no surprise that Davies cites Seven Brides for Seven Brothers as inspirational). When the Guthrie family move house to accommodate their ever expanding brood, they do so to the strains of Wayfaring Stranger hauntingly sung by Jennifer John. On her wedding night, Chris performs a keening rendition of Flowers of the Forest, the music of which is woven into the very fabric of Grassic Gibbon’s text. Later, Ewan (Kevin Guthrie) sings a few line of Robert Burns’s The Lass That Made the Bed to Me, another song taken directly from the rhapsodic sacred source. Throughout, Davies’s aim remains true. He is perhaps the only film-maker in the world who could stage a tipsy rendition of Ladies of Spain without the slightest hint of a Spielberg reference (it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d never seen Jaws). Above all, he portrays the cataclysmic impact of the war on a generation and their expectations. Chris loses her men, she has to cope with rumours of cowardice and desertion, and she sees the territory around her transformed. Life was hard for her – a cruel, incestuous father and a community that was often unforgiving in its iron-clad morality. But she was stirred by the power of the land, and therefore clung with her heart to a past that hadn’t been kind to her. From discussions with numerous people about the novel I know I was not alone in ignoring, or forgetting, the cruelty inherent in Chris’s domestic life or the abuse commonplace in the wider community. Is this because it’s so familiar to us personally that it’s unremarkable? Is it because we are so used to reading Scottish stories where the protagonist has to thole an authoritarian father or deal with brutality, family dysfunction and emotional neglect that we hardly notice it? Both are true for me and for many other Scots. The book is many things, a powerful fictional response to the First World War and its impact on a small rural community, a hymn to the natural beauties of the north east and its language and people as well as a lament for a way of life that is coming to an end. It is also a realistic account of rural life in Scotland with its privations and occasional brutalities. It is above all else though a book about Chris Guthrie and her path through life from a wide-eyed adolescent to a worldly-wise woman of 24. Along the way she suffers terribly, knows the pain of loss and the fulfilment of love but never loses sight of the beauty and power of the land around her. When it was published in 1932 it was an immediate commercial and critical success and it has never been out of print. It is now regarded as a classic and in 2016 was voted Scotland’s favourite novel in a BBC poll. The novel endures just as Chris Guthrie endures. The same can be said about ‘Frenchness’ or ‘Italianness or ‘Russianness’ as has been said about ‘Scottishness’. The point is not to be dismissive of any discussion of nationality and what it means to be ‘Scottish’ or ‘French’ or Italian’ or Russian’ or whatever; the point is that any contemporary discussion of nationality needs to question how useful the concept of a ‘national psyche’ is in the contemporary world.