Gibbon is tracing humanity’s shift to the age of total politics and economic depression, which for him was a sign that the old order was breaking up. The second instalment, Cloud Howe, takes us into the era of the General Strike in the 1920s, while the concluding volume, Grey Granite, follows Chris and her communist son Ewan as they negotiate urban life in the 1930s. Kinraddie represents the original age of agriculture in Gibbon’s imagination, and this needs to be seen in the context of the whole Scots Quair trilogy.

For Gibbon, who propagandised for diffusionism in many of his books, humans needed to break with militarist/capitalist civilisation to achieve a new peaceful way of life. Agriculture gave us a rootedness that created codes of gender, class, morality and religion that suppress human liberty. Before accidentally discovering agriculture through the flooding of the Nile basin, goes the theory, humans had been free hunter-gatherers. Gibbon was attracted to communism too, but his writing is also heavily influenced by the theory of diffusionism, which was popular in his lifetime.ĭiffusionism held that civilisation emerged from ancient Egypt, a place that particularly interested Gibbon, who had been stationed there with the British army in the 1920s. Many writers of the 1930s would turn to communism to solve what they perceived as the crisis in liberal capitalism, and to express their opposition to fascism – Laurie Lee, for instance, would fight against Franco in Spain.

For Gibbon, religion and war are among the various corrupt manifestations of civilisation. This different view of the past is no accident. But while the autobiographical narrator of Cider With Rosie remembers his childhood as an almost Edenic age before the post-war fall into modernity, the roots of evil already trouble Chris Guthrie’s girlhood, especially in the form of the Calvinist religion practised by her abusive father (played in the film by Peter Mullan).

Lee’s novel, set in a Cotswold village in central England, also captures a way of life in which “the horse was king” that was to be brutally ended by the First World War. Sunset Song has much in common with that favourite novel of English regional life, Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie, which was itself recently adapted by the BBC. The surrounding woods are cut down for timber profit at one point, for instance, thus exposing the farmland and making it impossible to farm. But more broadly it is about how capitalism fragments local communities. The story focuses on Chris Guthrie (played in the film by Agyness Deyn) and her struggle to decide whether to stay on the land she loves or pursue her education.

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