The story he weaves round the passionate character of Chris Guthrie, a woman who endures terrible suffering as well as fulfilling love, is rough and unforgiving in its picture of 20th-century feudalism before the first world war. Yet it’s also stamped with a nostalgia he can never quite cast off. There are also a number of adaptations for the stage. One of the best known is by Alastair Cording.

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. 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.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. Islamic state and Taliban were not the first to realise that profound change comes only by killing the roots, the image, the word, the idea of the fully creative human. The results are well recorded. Burns wrote ‘My Heart is in the Highlands’ for James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, to which he was a contributing editor. According to Burns’ notes that accompanied its publication, his song is a remix of ‘a string of shreds and patches from various sources’, including ‘The Boys of Kilkenny’ and ‘The Strong Walls of Derry’, a couple of Irish anti-Jacobite songs. Sunset Song: watch the exclusive trailer for the first world war tragedy starring Agyness Deyn – video Guardian 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.

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). Chris Guthrie is the most passionate and appealing heroine in Scottish literature; Grassic Gibbon’s magnificent novel is fresh, powerful and timeless” The Mill of Benholm in Kincardine, which was chosen by the BBC team filming the serial of Sunset Song. But I am sure I am not the only person who was absolutely aghast at the appalling contribution of this author in 2014.The Epilude describes the aftermath of World War I and how it affected Kinraddie. The church’s new minister announces that the estate will erect a statue in honor of its people who died in combat. Guthrie recovers from her deep depression over Ewan’s death, renewing her will to press on and create a better life for her and young Ewan. She falls in love with the reverend. At the end of the novel, she goes to the Standing Stones near her home for the erection ceremony of the War Memorial, and as the sun sets, remarks that her life has forever changed. It presumes that particular nations have distinctive psychological make-ups which are culturally reinforced by a common language and/or heritage, which of course they don’t. Nowadays, we’re more accustomed to thinking of nations as ever-changing pluralities of language and/or historical communities. 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” Why now are we getting an article that reflects badly on Scotland’s now distant past? Can we look forward to further pieces highlighting the treatment of witches, sectarianism or whatever shameful demonstration of the failures of the current people of Scotland.

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. Grassic Gibbon – his real name was James Leslie Mitchell – was radical in the way he used language (as he was in politics) to convey feelings in descriptions that read as if they are the inner thoughts of people, rendered with a poetic pulse that he manages to sustain against the danger that the artificiality might get too much. The book’s personality is shaped by that language. This is the book I would have voted for as I had fallen in love with it at university when studying it as a set text. The book’s language is mesmerising. Indeed ‘the speak’ of Kinraddie is unforgettable not just because it’s a novel literary device but because it echoes Scottish speech. Gibbon’s description of ‘the land’ is also memorable as is his portrayal of the devastating effects of war and mechanisation on a Scottish agricultural community.Being evicted from your home is probably the most brutalising experience you can experience short of actual violence, and a very costly experience too.