Cloud Howe, The Second Book of A Scots Quair

A Scots Quair #2

by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Drew Charles (Introduction)

Lewis Grassic Gibbon's follow-up to Sunset Song, Cloud Howe carries on the saga of Chris Guthrie as her story moves from the rural Mearns to the small town of Segget. Grassic Gibbon matches his previous evocations of Scottish rural life with his descriptions of the struggles of village life in post-war Scotland. As the middle chapter of the Scots Quair trilogy Cloud Howe is as essential as its predecessor.

This new Kindle edition contains an introduction by writer Drew Charles.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Scotland, Historical Fiction, 20th Century, Historical, Novels

173 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1933

About the author

Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pen name of the Scottish author James Leslie Mitchell.

Born in Auchterless and raised in Arbuthnott, then in Kincardineshire, Mitchell started working as a journalist for the Aberdeen Journal and the Scottish Farmer at age 16. In 1919 he joined the Royal Army Service Corps and served in Iran, India and Egypt before enlisting in the Royal Air Force in 1920. In the RAF he worked as a clerk and spent some time in the Middle East. He married Rebecca Middleton in 1925, with whom he settled in Welwyn Garden City. He began writing full-time in 1929. Mitchell wrote numerous books and shorter works under both his real name and nom de plume before his early death in 1935 of peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer.

Reviews

[Carlos · Rating 1 out of 5]

[Leído en inglés. Reseña en español más abajo]

After reading "Sunset Song", the previous part of this trio, I must say that this part wasn't much better than the previous one for a few reasons: As I said in my review for "Sunset Song", English is not my native language and maybe I shouldn't have read it in this language. However, I have read several books in English before and my English is quite decent since sometimes I even use it more than Spanish -my native language-. Maybe the edition I bought was not the simplest one to understand and follow. Also, we have the main character again -Chris- but in this part I didn't feel the book was too centred in her, but in her relatives, the life in the village and all the historical context in between, which was quite confusing and difficult to follow.
I have the third and final part, which I will read, but just because I do have this rule of finishing what I have and what I started. I sincerely hope it will improve, at least a bit.

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Después de leer "Sunset Song", la parte anterior de este trío, debo debir que esta parte no fue mucho mejor que la previa por unas cuantas razones: Como dije en mi reseña de "Sunset Song", el inglés no es mi idioma nativo y quizás no debí haberlo leído en este idioma. Sin embargo, he leído bastantes libros en inglés anteriormente y mi inglés es bastante decente ya que a veces lo uso incluso más que el español -mi idioma nativo-. Quizás la edición que compré no fue la más simple para entender y seguir. Además, tenemos nuevamente a la personaje principal -Chris- pero en esta parte no sentí que el libro estaba muy centrado en ella, sino en sus familiares, la vida en la aldea y todo el contexto histórico entre medio, lo que es muy confuso y difícil de seguir.
Tengo la tercera y última parte, la cual leeré, pero solo porque tengo esta regla de temrinar lo que he empezado. Sinceramente espero que mejore, aunque sea un poco.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

The shelving, status updates and star rating constitute how I felt about this book.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chris Guthrie Tavendale is now married to Robert Colquhoun, a minister. The child, Ewan Tavendale, is with them, of course, but everyone - Ewan and all the village of Segget knows he is not Robert’s son.

Is Segget a typical Scots village? I have no way of knowing that. But it is a village full of gossip mongers. Most of the gossip is not just the truth shaded with a bit of scandal, but instead mostly scandalous gossip and often not even a shred of truth mixed in. When gossip surrounds Chris and family, at least we know the unvarnished truth.

I have been reading these in the Kindle trilogy edition, A Scots Quair, A Trilogy including Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, Grey Granite. There is the same heavy Scots writing style and so I again found myself googling words which aren’t in the Kindle dictionary. That said, I love this presentation as I found it enriches the story in a way I believe straight English would not.

I think this not quite as good as Sunset Song, the first in the trilogy. Perhaps because I had already come know Chris, there didn’t seem any need for further characterization. I still felt for her, of course, and the author doesn’t slight us in knowing how she feels and thinks. Ewan, though, leaves off being a child and I hope to see more of him in the final installment. I’m sure I’ll be sorry to leave this family behind. I’d like to find a 5th star for this, but I think that would be an exaggeration. Still, this is a very very good 4-stars.

[Angie · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was a student in the beautiful city of Edinburgh in the late 1980's I remember vividly sitting in the halls of residence out on the east coast looking out over a large field and then beyond to Cramond Island and the River Forth, then across to the Kingdom of Fife. I had not experienced it before but I saw a sea 'haar' rolling in across the fields, a swirling white billowing layer of cloud and mist crawling towards me. It totally freaked me out at the time as I had never seen anything like it except in sci-fi films. I found out afterwards what it actually was from a flat mate from Orkney who must have seen them regularly and thought I had flipped (a Haar forms when a parcel of warm air passes over the cold North Sea. The warm air at the bottom of the parcel is cooled by the cold air below, until it can no longer 'hold' the moisture that was previously contained within. Therefore, it releases some of the moisture in the form of liquid water through condensation. Add an onshore component like a wind of 5-20mph, and the cooling in the bottom of the warm parcel of air is spread upwards and generates a fog like Haar.)

Anyway, I am digressing here, except to say I was reminded of this bizarre and unforgettable experience when I read this book. I felt that Grassic Gibbon had done justice to the reverence of the nature and power of the land around him; the power and bleakness of the Scottish landscape and its at times bizarre weather and its hold over the men who have inhabited its hills and valleys for thousands of years. His descriptions of the natural backdrop to this story were incredibly strong, vivid and very beautifully written. The effect of his conscious thought of their timelessness was quite pertinent to the characters in the story at this time, as if they are only passing through as others have before them.

In this second part of the trilogy, Chris has now married the local minister and is finding her feet in her new role, despite her misgivings and no apparent faith of her own, apart from her devotion to the landscape she has worked and known so well all her life. Each chapter is named after a different cloud formation. At times it was as if the clouds and weather formations around our heroine were reflective of her moods and the twists and turns of her life, at all times a crucial backdrop to this tale. I had enjoyed part 1 so much, I perhaps had built this up in my mind as being a dead cert for a great read. I found the first two thirds quite hard going (the language was much more colloquial and difficult than in Sunset Song); mainly it is concerned with the local characters and their political persuasions and divisions. The presence of fascism and socialism in Britain and Europe between the two wars has a direct effect on their outlook and this will obviously develop further in the third part of this trilogy.

Chris doesn't really let out her feelings until the last third of the book and this is when I began to enjoy it so much more. Her son is a bright boy and interested in the tools and artefacts he digs up on the Howe, from the ancient bronze age settlements; flints, axes and the like. For Chris it is symbolic of her eventual abandonment of any semblance of faith she had and her empathy with the land in which she was born and raised comes through as the mainstay of her faith in life and nature and in the son she had carried, given birth to and loves completely. The passages where her maternal love is described were movingly written and uncannily described with great tenderness and feeling. She is an unusual character and is a little more passive than I had expected in this novel until the end.

It was an interesting and moving read. I will read the third part but have a feeling that Sunset Song is going to be the best of the lot.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cloud Howe is the sequel to Sunset Song, second in Grassic Gibbon's A Scots Quair. I didn't realise until I read this second book that the trilogy was written while he was living deep in the Home Counties, in Welwyn Garden City. I wonder how it felt to write fiction about Aberdeenshire in lyrical Scots while living in a new town that's about as English as it gets. Neither had I realised that Grassic Gibbon died at the age of only thirty-four. Such context adds to the rather fascinating ambivalence, or perhaps conflicted emotions would be a better term, inherent in the depiction of his setting. Cloud Howe takes place in the small town of Segget, where Chris Guthrie moves with her new husband. The descriptions of the natural environment are suffused with yearning; well might Grassic Gibbon have yearned for hills and wildness in a carefully planned and exceedingly flat garden city:

Underfoot the frost held hard and firm in the rising sun of the New Year's Day, that sun a red smoulder down in the Howe, the hoar was a blanching on post and hedge, rimming the dykes, far up in the Mounth the veilings of mist were draping the hills, except that now and then they blew off and you saw the coarse country deep in the haughs, remote with a flicker of red on the roofs of some shepherd's sheiling high in the heath.

Yet the people of Segget are shown in astonishingly unflattering light, generally as cruel gossips, liars, rapists, drunks, and idiots. Chris' husband Robert becomes increasingly disillusioned and cynical as economic downturn bites, unions are crushed, and unemployment rises. The economic and psychological constrictions of the class system become increasingly evident. The residents of Segget are collectively more of a protagonist than Chris and her son Ewan, although the narrative repeatedly returns to the two of them. Both remain remarkably disconnected from the cruelties of local gossip and are therefore able to live in relative contentment. However this is also a spiritual, even religious, book. Grassic Gibbon's gorgeous prose shifts effortlessly from domestic details to existential musing, which can have an impressively disorientating effect:

In a ten years time what thing might have been? She might stand on this hill, she might rot in a grave, it would matter nothing, the world would go on, young Ewan dead as his father was dead, or hither and borne, far from Kinraddie; oh, once she had seen in these parks, she remembered, the truth, and the only truth that there was, that only the sky and the seasons endured, slow in their change, the cry of the rain, the whistle of the whins on a winter night under the sailing edge of the moon-

And suddenly, daft-like, she found herself weep, quiet, she thought that she made no noise, but Robert knew, and his arm came around her.
It was Ewan? Oh, Chris, he won't grudge you me!
Ewan? It was Time himself she had seen, haunting their tracks with unstaying feet.

But the spring was coming.

I found Cloud Howe a bleaker novel than Sunset Song and perhaps less cohesive for not focusing so closely on Chris, albeit still powerful. It sustains the same wonderful writing style, so that even the grimmest of incidents are beautifully expressed. Finally, I dodged a bullet by not reading the back cover of this edition when I found it in a charity shop. The blurb spoils several key events, which would probably have reduced their impact. As it was, I found Chris losing her baby then her husband moving. She and Robert had already grown apart as he succumbed to depression and mysticism, a slow tragedy culminating dramatically with his death in the pulpit. The introduction comments thoughtfully on this.

[Rocío Prieto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Volver a Chris es como regresar a un lugar muy querido: sigue siendo ella, sigue estando su mundo, pero algo ha cambiado. Algo en su voz, en su mirada, en la forma en que se cuenta a sí misma. “Valle de nubes” no es solo la continuación de ���Canción del ocaso”, es también el retrato de una pérdida: de una cierta inocencia, de una forma de estar en el mundo, tal vez también de una esperanza.

En este segundo volumen, Chris ya no está en la granja de su juventud. Su vida ha girado hacia lo doméstico, lo familiar, lo pequeño: vive en un pueblo cercano, casada con Robert y madre de un niño, Ewan, que empieza a mirar el mundo con preguntas nuevas. La pasión y la libertad que impregnaban la Chris de antes se han visto reemplazadas por la rutina, la obligación, y cierta amargura contenida. Hay amor, sí, pero uno más callado, más herido. Lo que late es una especie de resignación lúcida, una tristeza tranquila que no necesita grandes dramas para sentirse en cada página.

Y ese cambio se refleja también en el estilo: la voz de Chris ha cambiado. Ya no nos habla con el ímpetu de antes. Ahora lo hace con una distancia melancólica, como si hablara desde el fondo de un pozo al que ha ido bajando despacio. El lenguaje se ha vuelto más seco, más contenido, casi escaso por momentos. Gibbon parece querer que sintamos esa pérdida desde dentro, no como un hecho narrado, sino como un tono, una atmósfera. Lo logra. Pero eso también implica que nos alejamos un poco de ella, que ya no duele tanto lo que le pasa, sino el no poder llegar a consolarla.

Hay escenas que aún brillan con la belleza ruda y honesta de la primera parte. Hay frases que tienen la fuerza de una vida entera y paisajes que siguen oliendo a barro y a viento del norte. Pero ya no hay épica en lo cotidiano. Lo que hay es resistencia. Chris sigue siendo fuerte, pero ha aprendido a no esperar demasiado. Y sin embargo, cuida. Cría a Ewan con ternura y con firmeza. Se enfrenta a una comunidad rígida y a un marido convencional sin perder del todo su voz, aunque a veces la sienta lejana hasta para sí misma.

Este libro me acompañó en un momento raro, de esos en los que una no sabe si se está alejando de algo o acercándose a otra cosa. Y quizá por eso lo sentí tan cerca. No me deslumbró como el primero, no me rompió como esperaba. Pero me dejó pensando en todo lo que se pierde por el camino cuando una decide quedarse. Y eso también pesa.

Chris no es ya la joven que miraba el horizonte con hambre. Pero sigue mirando. Aunque lo que vea ahora no siempre le guste, aunque lo haga en silencio, aunque nadie la escuche. Y yo, al menos, sigo queriendo saber adónde la lleva esa mirada.

[Ainhoa Verdú · Rating 4 out of 5]

Qué maravilla volver a Escocia. Aunque hayamos dejado atrás Kinraddie, en este libro conocemos por primera vez el pueblo de Segget y a sus habitantes. Tanto Segget como Escocia, están viviendo de primera mano las más terribles consecuencias de la Gran Guerra, desde las económicas, hasta las más sociales o religiosas.

Desde el punto de vista de Chris, ahora casada con el reverendo del pueblo, vemos como viven el día a día los habitantes de Segget y como se enfrentan a los cambios del siglo XX tras la guerra, desde sus particulares, dinámicos e incluso chafarderos puntos de vista. Lewis Grassic Gibbon sigue con esa escritura tan maravillosa que me cautivó en Canción del Ocaso, volviendo a forjar una novela inolvidable y entrañable a la que volveré siempre que quiera sentirme en Escocia.

La nota del editor en memoria de Miguel Ángel Pérez Pérez, el traductor de esta novela, la cuál no pudo acabar a causa de su repentina muerte, es posiblemente lo mejor de esta edición. La memoria de Miguel Ángel seguirá viva a través de estas páginas y en esta historia tan importante para él.

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

The after-shocks of war...

(NB Since this is a review of the second part of a trilogy, it will contain some mild spoilers for the first part, Sunset Song.

The Great War is over, and with it so is the first phase of Chris Guthrie’s life. Now married to Robert Colquohoun, she goes with him to make a home in the small town of Segget, where he is to take up the position of minister in the Presbyterian church. The book takes us from the end of the war through to the ‘30s, a time frame that includes the Depression, the General Strike and the rise of the two warring philosophies that would rip the European twentieth century apart – fascism and socialism. In Scotland as elsewhere, the horrors of the war have left scars – not just on those people who have lost sons and husbands, but on those who served and came home, some left physically maimed and others injured more insidiously, with what we would now term PTSD but which then was called shell-shock, if it was recognised at all, or was ignored completely. The other casualty of war, Gibbon suggests, was faith. Church attendances are down, even believers are baffled by how a good God could have allowed such atrocities to happen, and people are now willing to defy the Church completely and openly call themselves atheist. It is in this atmosphere that the rather visionary Robert will try to inspire his new flock and Chris will dutifully observe the Church’s practices while making little effort to pretend that she believes in Robert’s God.

This second volume of A Scots Quair is written with considerably more dialect than the first, and so will be a tougher read for non-Scots or younger Scots, though it’s done very well. I might as well start by saying I don’t think it’s anywhere near to Sunset Song in terms of the writing, structure or in what it has to say about society, though it tries. I found most of it a drag – a series of anecdotes about the occupants of this small town, who drift in and out in order to help Gibbon make points, rather than his points arising seemingly naturally from their stories. These anecdotes are designed to show their lives, hardships and the state of politics. Some are interesting, some mildly humorous, many are quite crude, and for me they didn’t quite come together to form a quilt – they are more like scraps of material waiting for someone to stitch them together. Almost no-one is good – I don’t mean that they don’t conform to society’s moral codes, although they don’t, but that they don’t seem to love and support each other. We see children who hate and abuse their parents and vice-versa, men who abuse and sometimes rape women, women who are spiteful and vindictive. There’s a lot of drunkenness which would certainly have been true of Scottish society, but a lack of warmth and generosity of spirit, which doesn’t ring true to me and seems in direct contrast to the feeling of community in Sunset Song.

Chris herself is almost entirely passive and is an example of what I mean about Gibbon using his characters. In Sunset Song, Chris had a profound connection to the land she farmed and this was a major part of her personality. Between the books, she has apparently simply given up farming and has willingly gone off to live in a town and become a housewife. Since clearly this is because Gibbon wanted to write about a town this time, it would have been less jarring if he’d left Chris in Kinraddie and given Robert a different wife. A recurring character who changes so completely between books gives a sense of dislocation rather than of continuity. He tries to show that Chris still feels connected to the land by having her going for long solitary walks, but this is no substitute. She also seems to have moved up a class, not just outwardly as one would by marrying a minister at that time, but inwardly, having developed a rather snobbish ability to look down on the townspeople.

Robert is a much more successful character and for me is the heart of the book. Outwardly he seems fine after his war experiences, although he has been left with weakened lungs from exposure to gas attacks. But inwardly, his experiences haunt him increasingly, making his relationship with his God fraught – wavering between loss of faith and visionary ecstasy. He is also torn when he sees the poverty and inequality of society growing ever worse. Politically he is drawn towards the ideas of the socialists, but they espouse atheism as part of their creed, leaving Robert in an uneasy no-man’s-land. I wondered why this man, to whom religion was far more than a tradition or a job, would have married a woman who not only didn’t believe but made it clear from the beginning that she had no intention of fulfilling the customary role of a minister’s wife by becoming a central figure in the community. They seem entirely mismatched and again Gibbon doesn’t show us their courtship, which happened off-page between books.

Chris’ son, Ewan, grows up during the course of the book and it seems to set him up to be the main character in the third volume. Through him, we see the increasing Englishing of the language and culture – a theme also central to Sunset Song.

Overall, I found this disappointing and not nearly as memorable as the excellent and highly recommended Sunset Song. I will go on to read the third book, Grey Granite, but more out of a sense of duty than eager anticipation.

www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com

[Louise]

So the closer I got to the end of this book the slower I was reading it. I didn’t want to rate it because I’m still unsure of how I feel about it.
This is the second book of the scots quair following my favourite book sunset song, and it still has the same beautiful writing style and description of Lewis, but it is very different from the first. It definitely retells history of when Lewis was writing this (I think 1933?) and it is a lot darker and holds a lot less of the magic and beauty that sunset song does.

I’ve heard similar things about the third, but maybe I’ll still read it and see!

[cafejuntoalibros · Rating 4 out of 5]

Si bien es cierto que tiene una excelente narración y que me gustó la historia, la sentí plana y me costó conectar, y si me permiten poner en una balanza, me gustó más Canción de Ocaso 🙈. Pero para todo hay gustos, no puedo dejar de recomendar la novela porque vale la pena rescatar el aspecto histórico.

[Alejandro · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Valle de nubes' continúa la historia de Chris Guthrie, nuestra protagonista que por diversos motivos abandona Kinraddie junto a su familia para mudarse a Segget, el escenario principal de esta segunda entrega. Allí se enfrentará a los desafíos de la vida en una comunidad rural en constante transformación, que reflejará el cambio social, político y económico que se produjo en Escocia en los años veinte.

Volvemos a encontrarnos con el particular estilo literario de Lewis Grassic Gibbon: una prosa evocadora, nostálgica y muy visual, con la que nos sumerge de lleno en Segget, en sus calles y en las vidas de sus peculiares habitantes, capturando la esencia del paisaje y la cultura del país. Al final es una novela muy coral con la que Gibbon explora una amplia gama de experiencias y perspectivas, y me ha parecido excelente la introducción de los nuevos personajes y sus evoluciones. Son todos unos secundarios notables que nos regalan escenas bonitas, entrañables y en algunos casos desternillantes. También me ha gustado mucho ver el cambio de Chris respecto a la primera parte, ver cómo ha madurado su personaje y cómo sigue creciendo con inquietudes distintas.

Una continuación excelente que seguirá haciendo las delicias de los lectores que disfruten de una historia clásica costumbrista ambientada en el mundo rural.

[Jeff Koeppen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cloud Howe picks up where the most excellent Sunset Song left off with Chris Guthrie moving on with her life in post WWI Scotland. It is written the same style as was Sunset Song, with long sentences and chock full of early 20th century Scottish colloquiums. In Sunset Song the themes were hinted at by the chapters' titles and were based on agricultural terms whereas in Cloud Howe they were based on cloud types. The story telling was just fantastic; I laughed a number of times and found myself flipping to the glossary regularly again (and was disappointed to find that some words were not included, and I didn’t want to resort to Google). Cloud Howe took much more effort to read than Sunset Song did to listen to, I’m still disappointed that there isn’t an audio version of Cloud Howe out there narrated by Eileen McCallum.

I can’t say much about the plot of Cloud Howe so as not to spoil Sunset Song. Cloud Howe spends most of its time in the early 1920s and spends significant time with our heroine Chris Guthrie, but increases the amount of ink devoted to her husband and her son Ewan. Ewan is a teenager and becomes more and more of an important character as the book trudges on. Early in the book, Chris’s husband changes jobs and moves the family. So, while Sunset Song was set in the small farming community of Kinraddie and focuses on rural life, Cloud Howe is set in the larger burg of Segget, just down the road from Kinraddie, and focuses on small town life. Like Kinraddie, Segget is fully of interesting characters and there is never a dull moment. And like Sunset Song, Gibbon takes his time to give us some colorful backstory on many of the characters in the early parts of the book.

Cloud Howe seemed a little darker to me that Sunset Song. Chris is faced with her husband’s mental and physical problems related to his experience in WWI. The town is divided over labor and political issues, and gossip is more plentiful and negative than it was in Kinraddie.

What really struck me in Cloud Howe was that Chris and her son Ewan are non-believers and they don’t hide it and are not quiet about it. The Scott’s Quair trilogy was written in the early 1930s when Christianity had a stronger grip on the western world. It seems unusual to have two major characters be non-believers when it was probably less accepted then than it is now. Maybe things were different in the UK. I don’t know, but I like it.

This was a wonderful book and I’m looking forward to finishing the trilogy with Grey Granite.

[Malvina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book 2 of 'A Scots Quair'.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon is a beautiful, lyrical writer, obviously at one with Scotland and its fabulous beauty. It's evident in every line and page of this book as it follows the story of Chris Guthrie and her son Ewan after WWI. Now married to a minister and living at Segget, the story follows the ups and downs of village life. I particularly loved the last third of the book where we heard more of Chris's thoughts. She is the backbone of this story, along with Scotland itself and the quirks of her people. It was also nice to see a little more of Ewan as he grows, along with his thoughts and feelings and his obvious growing intrigue with the history of the land as he uncovers artefacts and so on. He's also developing a bolder personality; good to see. The end of Book 2 is a bit heartbreaking... I need to read on to see if Chris finds happiness at last.

[labaldasilvestre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Para mí son 3,5 estrellas. No lo he disfrutado tanto como Canción del ocaso (hubiese sido imposible) porque se centra demasiado en la vida de los habitantes de Segget y a mí quien me interesa es Chris. Creo que no tenía mucho sentido que el autor continuase la historia pero ya que lo hizo, puedo decir que me encanta la pluma luminosa de Grassic Gibbon, está llena de verdad.

[Ginebra Lavao Lizcano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Same beautiful and deep Scottish writing style as the first one, but the story was a wee bit duller.

[Andrea - Arte para Contar · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 ⭐

[PennsyLady (Bev) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Scots Quair is a trilogy by the Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon, describing the life of Chris Guthrie, a woman from the north east of Scotland during the early 20th century.
It consists of three novels: Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, and Grey Granite.
The first is widely regarded as an important classic.
A comprehensive glossary of the Scots dialect is included. " (from BN overview)

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Meet the Author (from BN)

"Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell) was one of the finest writers of the twentieth century.
Born in Aberdeenshire in 1901, he died at the age of thirty-four.
He was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, essays and science fiction, and his writing reflected his wide interest in religion, archaeology, history, politics and science.
... the Scots Quair trilogy, is his most renowned work, and has become a landmark in Scottish literature.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

BBC


Lewis Grassic Gibbon's powerful sequel to Sunset Song dramatised by Donna Franceschild.

Atmospheric drama about Grassic Gibbon's best-loved character, Chris.

Now married to Robert, a young and idealistic minister, Chris and her family move from the crofting village of Kinraddie to the mill town of Segget in Aberdeenshire. Living in the wake of the Great War and during the build up to the General Strike, they find themselves instrumental in the small town's epic class struggle.

Starring Amy Manson and Robin Laing.

Directed by Kirsty Williams.

Gutenberg Project

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the second book of the trilogy A Scots Quair.

The plot continues with the saga of Chris Guthrie and his son Ewan. However, her tragical life seems to have no end.

The setting takes place in Segget, where the author is buried in the SW corner of the churchyard.



The sequel of this book is Grey Granite.

[Manu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ser joven como nunca lo habías sido, pues te habías visto atrapada y machacada por las ruedas de los días; en este pequeño valle adusto con sus fatigas y sinsabores cuántas cosas te habías perdido, ¡cuántas! Las cosas que a la gente siempre les pasaba en los libros: ser tonta, con los vientos de los años de juventud enmarañados en tu cabello, noche por un sueño y el mundo por una canción. Ser joven; y ya NUNCA podrías serlo.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

i didn't enjoy this one as much as Sunset Song... for a number of reasons - found it was less about protagonist Chris and more about the socialism and other people in the village... which wasn't always that interesting. I had every intention of reading the 3rd book but wasn't that inspired by this one. also thought the ending was overly dramatic.

[Annette · Rating 2 out of 5]

I finally gave up, halfway through. The first installment, Sunset Song, is brilliant and a classic in the Scottish canon. However Gibbon wrote a series of three, and Cloud Howe is #2. While I recognize it is well written and a solid historical record, as well as an important story about a strong woman in times when it was mostly a man's world, it does not capture my attention. I've given up.

[Donna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not as good as Sunset Song, though it was interesting to see how the story continued.

[Hazel McHaffie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my second Lewis Grassic Gibbon and I loved it! It took me a while to get into Sunset Song but I instantly 'got' this one. Fabulous lilting language - like poetry - and so evocative of life in Scotland years ago. I can now see why his trilogy is a classic. And I'm now into the third one.

[Margareth8537 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellently written book. Beautiful language and descriptions

[Elle · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the reasons I'm reading these more individually and less as a trilogy these days is because I've tended to treat them as a unit in the past, which I think somewhat diminishes the power they have as individual novels. True, you cannot read one without its preceding book (yeah, Elle, that's why it's called a trilogy), but they should all be treated as independent of one another in most aspects besides the continuity of Chris and her successive names (Guthrie, Tavendale, Colquohoun, just Chris, as she says at one point during the book). There is the other bridge between them, of course, which is Chris's personal tragedy--not personal at all, because it's the tragedy of Scotland, and not tragic at all, because both Chris and Scotland continue on, having changed irrevocably and not at all.

The fuel for all three, another thing that binds all together, is how specific they are to their setting. Kinraddie, Segget--the former a farming village, the latter a slightly more urban town, where most folk are gripping tight to their role amongst the bourgeoisie, neither working class ("spinner dirt") nor the aristocracy ("gentry dirt"), but still uneducated, saved from the ignominy of the third class by some kind of ownership, although they're all essentially owned by the Mowats. It was somehow the same in the prior novel with the crofters.

And then there's Robert, not really so different from Ewan, Sr., at all, with his sudden aloofness and brokenness and Chris's continual realization she cannot rely on men (not even her son, but more on that in the next book), only herself, her only constant.

But where Ewan's story comes to what can only be described as an optimistic end, even in death, not a coward because it wasn't away from the war but to Chris he's going when he's shot for a deserter, Robert's trajectory is infinitely more tragic. Robert is a story of hope gone, optimism gone, just a man who died during the war and hadn't a clue, and Chris has realized that there's no trying to be happy, just getting up in the morning and getting whatever needs done, done. And the equilibrium of that attempt to persevere in the most neutral of senses is what makes a good life. That and not minding the gossip.

If you're looking at this review, you've doubtless already read either the trilogy or at least Sunset Song, so you don't need to hear whether it's worth taking up anything by Grassic Gibbon. The world isn't exactly divided into people who like or dislike him; it's more likely divided into people who are willing to make the attempt and thusly will enjoy the novels, and those who just can't get through the first few paragraphs because it's just so hard to read the dialect (it's really not--one of the great things about the vast majority of the Scots vocabulary is that the significance of most terms can be inferred from the way they sound; I have spent relatively little time in the back of the book, paging through the glossary).

These are still my favorite novels of all time. I always seem to read them at crucial moments in my life, or strange ones at least, and my reading is always heavily affected by where I am emotionally. This time I laughed less and cried less, but found the writing no less true, and no less beautiful.

The last takeaway is that my battered copy of A Scots Quair will soon need to be retired to a place it can be seen, not read, and a new copy, hopefully hardback, will need to be bought. The current copy I have was bought on honeymoon in Scotland with my husband in 2014 (and a grand time it was, just ten days before the independence referendum). I bought it to take home with me after picking through a list of the best Scottish novels. I have since attempted to read some of the other novels on the list, and my choice has always been affirmed. In any case, this is likely the last time I read this copy in particular because she's so battered and I hope to hold on to her for the rest of my life.

[Neil MacDonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

If the first book of the trilogy, Sunset Song, is about the last days of the Scottish crofter, Cloud Howe, the second book, deals with the passing of the old age and the coming of the new one, leading up to Miners’ strike of 1926 and then on to the Great Depression. It has the same lyrical nature writing as Sunset Song, bracketed again by reflections on deep time. Chris Guthrie, now wife of the Minister, Robert Colquohoun, again takes to the high old places to find herself.

“you did this and that and you went down in hell to bring the fruit of your body to birth, it was nothing to the child that came from your womb, you gave to men the love of your heart, and they'd wring it dry to the last red drop, kind, dreadful and dear, and deep in their souls, whatever the pretence they played with you, they knew it a play and Life waiting outbye.”

The chapters are named after cloud formations—clouds in Chris’ mind are the ephemeral beliefs—God, socialism and so on—that sustain people’s actions, men’s more than women’s. Alongside Chris’ narration we begin to get that of her son, Ewan, as he grows with his steely, aloof determination, presaging the final book.

Chris has little hope for the Miner’s but even more contempt for the class ranged against working people, personified by the obnoxious landlord, Mowat:

“And it seemed she was looking at more than Mowat, the class that had made of the folk of Segget the dirt-hungry folk that they had been and were--made them so in sheer greed and sheer brag. You had little hope what the Miners could do, them or the Labour leaders of Robert, but they couldn't though they tried make a much worse mess than Mowat and his kind had done, you knew.”

The crushing of the strike breaks Robert, cowed now by the gentry and turning to a more quietest religiosity. Only at the end of the book does he, dying, recover his old fire in a denunciation from the pulpit.

[Nuria Carreras · Rating 4 out of 5]

Segget empezaba a despertar cuando Chris Colquohoun bajó por el sendero de guijarros de la casa parroquial. Allí los tejos eran espesos, y en ellos había murmullos de estorninos y un piar somnoliento al filo del amanecer, pero abajo en la oscuridad, al llegar al camino, ya se veían luces que titilaban aquí y allá, en las casas de Segget, en las callejuelas de los tejedores, y olía a estiércol y gachas. Pero poca atención prestó a todo eso Chris, que iba deprisa mirando al cielo del este, con el cálido aire de mayo en el rostro, y giró en dirección norte por el camino de los Meiklebogs. Este tenía tantos surcos y porquería de los carros que había un dicho en Segget que decía: Hay un camino al cielo y otro al infierno, pero maldito sea el camino a los Meiklebogs.

Valle de nubes, ( Cloud Howe) 1933
Trilogía Escocesa II
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
@trotalibros
Traducción de Miguel Ángel Pérez y Ana Eiroa Guillén

Tras la muerte de su marido en la IGM, Chris se casa con el reverendo Colquohoun, un idealista comprometido con los cambios sociales que llegan y junto a él y su hijo Ewan, abandona la rural Kinraddie, para establecerse en una pequeña ciudad industrial, sacudida por el auge del laborismo y los contrastes sociales.

Mientras su esposo Robert lucha contra sus crisis espirituales y los demonios de la guerra, Chris se enfrenta a una nueva etapa de su viaje vital.

Lewis Grassic tienen una maestría especial para moverse en un entorno coral, y dibuja una galería de personajes muy diversos y peculiares, para enmarcar de nuevo a la gran protagonista de la historia, Chris, llegando a la madurez.

Una lectura muy emotiva ❤️

Capítulos titulados Nivel 3 #retonetherfield2024

#valledenubes #trilogiaescocesa #cloudhowe #lewisgrassicgibbon #leeresvivir #leermola #leoclásicos #britishclassic

[Kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nachdem ihr Mann Ewan in ersten Weltkrieg gefallen ist, bleibt Chris nur kurze Zeit alleine. Sehr zum Erstaunen der Menschen in ihrem kleinen Dorf heiratet sie Robert, einen Pfarrer. Als Robert endlich seine eigene Gemeinde bekommt, ziehen die beiden ins Pfarrhaus von Setter. Wird Chris wieder ihr Glück finden?

Chris kann es den Menschen ihrem Dorf nicht recht machen. Sie heiratet zu schnell nach Ewans Tod, sie lässt sich von ihrem Hausmädchen mit "Mem" anreden und zeigt so, dass sie sich für etwas Besseres hält, sie wandert nachts durch die Gegend, beteiligt sich nicht ausreichend am Gemeindeleben und wird tatsächlich noch einmal schwanger. Aber hätte sie all das nicht getan, wäre es auch nicht richtig gewesen. Zum Glück hat sie mit Robert einen Mann an ihrer Seite, der hinter ihr steht.

Obwohl er Pfarrer ist, geht er genauso gerne wie sie in die Hügel rund um ihr Heimatdorf. Er hört nicht blind auf die Kirchenältesten, sondern vertritt seine eigenen Ansichten. Natürlich ist das der schlechte Einfluss seiner Frau, denn was kann man von einem Mädchen von einer kleinen Farm auch anderes erwarten? Und dann noch ihr Sohn Ewan, der sich offensichtlich auch für etwas Besseres hält und die höhere Schule besucht, die Chris auch so gerne besucht hätte.

Im Gegensatz zum ersten Teil ist Chris in dieser Geschichte sehr die Geschichte ein wenig zäh angefangen. Aber dann konnte ich wieder einen Blick in Chris' Herz erhaschen, und von dem Augenblick hatte mich das Buch gepackt.

[maria ✿ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Straight off, I know that no other book in the trilogy will beat “Sunset Song”, the first book. It was so good and had done such a good job at encapsulating the Scottish countryside and Scotland’s hidden beauty: nature.

I high hopes and this one did not meet any…I was so disappointed!! It wasn’t too bad, just a bit boring and quite samey-samey throughout, nothing that engaging.

Also Chris was done so dirty, making her re-marry, have kids and live in a town that loves to gossip, all over AGAIN!! At least in Kinraddie they has all knew each other for years, whereas in Segget I felt a lack of connection…

As well as this, Chris had zero character development in the second book. What made “Sunset Song” so magical was Chris’s character development and the sense of community that existed in Kinraddie (Portraying what a classic Scottish town is actually like!)

I love all of this a more about “Sunset Song” and was so sad when “Cloud Howe” did not live up the the perfection of “Sunset Song”. Nor did it add anything to the plot other than Chris having a miscarriage? Which wasn’t until the end anyway so?…