Grey Granite

Description

Chris Guthrie and her son, Ewan, have come to the industrial town of Duncairn, where life is as hard as the granite of the buildings all around them. These are the Depression years of the 1930s, and Chris is far from the fields of her youth in Sunset Song. In a society of factory owners, shopkeepers, policemen, petty clerks and industrial labourers, 'Chris Caledonia' must make her living as bets she can by working in Ma Cleghorn's boarding house. Ewan finds employment in a steel foundry and tries to lead a peaceful strike against the manufacture of armaments. In the face of violence and police brutality, his socialist idealism is forged into something harder and fiercer as he becomes a communist activist ready to sacrifice himself, his girlfriend and even the truth itself, for the cause. Grey Granite is the last and grimmest volume of the Scots Quair trilogy. Chris Guthrie is one of the great characters in Scottish Literature and no reader of Sunset Song and Cloud Howe should miss this last rich chapter in her tale.

James Leslie Mitchell, 'Lewis Grassic Gibbon' (1901-35), was born and brought up in the rich farming land of Scotland's North-East Coast. After a brief and unsuccessful journalistic career, he joined the Royal Army Service Corps in 1919, serving in Persia, India and Egypt. Thereafter he spent a further six years as a clerk in the RAF. He married Rebecca Middleton in 1925, and became a full-time writer in 1929. The young couple settled in Welwyn Garden City where they lived until the writer's death in 1935. Mitchell published a number of short stories and articles and his first book, Hanno, or the Future of Exploration, appeared in 1928. Seven novels followed under his own name, Stained Radiance (1930); The Thirteenth Disciple (1931); Three Go Back (1932); The Lost Trumpet (1932); Image and Superscription (1933); Spartacus (1933); and Gay Hunter (1934). In the same year Mitchell collaborated with Hugh MacDiarmid to made Scottish Scene, which contained three of Mitchell's best short stories, later collected in A Scots Hairst (1969).