Chris had warned her, though, as we were forewarned in Cloud Howe.Ĭhris certainly does not have her troubles to seek. LIVING HISTORY ONESELF.” His treatment of Ellen Johns, a teacher who lodges in the boarding house and helped Ewan along the socialist path is in the end less than gallant. They’re nothing themselves.” Ewan himself thinks, “A hell of a thing to be History! ….

They’re just a squeeze and a cuddle we need to keep our lives going.

Her business partner, Ma Cleghorn, tells Chris there’s nothing worse than “some old runkle of a woman body living on with no man to tend and no bairns.” As to men, “(they) never live at all. The text is of its time in some of its references: “psychoanalyst Jewboy chaps” reads shockingly today. Once again there is the shifting of narrative viewpoint familiar from Sunset Song and Cloud Howe, by which the Rev MacShilluck for example is well drawn in a few devastating paragraphs scattered through the book. In addition, Ake Ogilvie, who had also come from Segget to work in Duncairn, opines, “there was as much graft in the average Scots toun as in any damn place across the Atlantic.” It seems that police accounts of incidents diverging somewhat from what actually happened are never new. He organises a subsequent strike and is arrested and beaten up by the police. He is drawn into socialism after taking a job in a metal works which later gains an arms contract. Taken on its own Grey Granite would stand as a fine mid-twentieth century Scots novel.Īnother factor contributing to Grey Granite’s relative lack of force is the focus moving from Chris to her son Ewan. And this is only a criticism in the context of Sunset Song and Cloud Howe. It is absolutely necessary in a novel sequence about modern Scotland (as he was essaying) to encompass the industrial habitat in which most Scots live. But in his defence here Gibbon certainly cannot do without Duncairn. Indeed it is notable that when the story breaks the bounds of the city the writing lifts.

While Gibbon’s descriptions of the industrial cityscape are fine they do not have the lyricism of his evocation of rural landscapes. It is perhaps this setting that makes Grey Granite seem less grounded than the previous two novels in A Scots Quair. After the form of Sunset Song and Cloud Howe, the previous books in Gibbon’s A Scots Quair trio, the text of Grey Granite is divided into four sections, here named after semi-precious stones, Epidote, Sphene, Apatite and Zircon, though unlike its predecessors there is no prelude, proem nor epilude in Grey Granite.įollowing the death of her second husband Robert Colquohoun – whose last action to shock his ex-parishioners was to have himself cremated – Chris Guthrie has used what money remains to her to move from Segget and take a half share in a boarding house in the city of Duncairn.

Lewis grassic gibbon a scots quair