More specifically, the book recounts the coming-of-age of farmer’s daughter Chris Guthrie, torn between educational ambitions and her attachment to the land.
Written using an English that incorporates the traditional Doric dialect, it’s crammed with words that will be unfamiliar to many readers- quean for “girl,” meikle for “big” or “much”-while its narrative register veers between the domestic and the cosmic, locating the inhabitants of the fictional Kinraddie, in northeast Scotland, within a broader sweep of history. The creation of a left-wing writer who emphasizes Scottish cultural and social autonomy, Sunset Song has an iconic status north of Hadrian’s Wall (unsurprisingly, it’s the favorite novel of Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon), but it’s a remarkable work by any measure, eminently modernist in its attention to the materiality of language and to the complex interweaving of personal and public history. Set in rural Scotland in the early 20th century, it is based on a 1932 novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the first part of his trilogy A Scots Quair. The film was a challenging project, not least because of the attendant expectations.
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