"The Lost Glen" vividly portrays a clash of cultures and
personalities against a background of a landscape in visible decay.
The cultural collision and its effects are explored through Ewan, a
young local man recently returned from university in disgrace, and
a retired English colonel staying at the village hotel. Both men in
a sense are alienated from the community, the younger because of a
haunting sense of failure, and the older through an unwillingness
to understand the local culture. They have a mutual antipathy. The
Colonel's self-imposed cultural isolation leads to aggressive
bullying and an openly lascivious attitude towards local young
women. His unworthiness as a representative of Anglo-Saxon culture
is largely compensated for by his young niece, who behaves with
sensitivity and integrity. She is clearly attracted to Ewan whose
sense of failure is complex and does not only concern his enforced
withdrawal from university and his involvement in an incident at
sea that cost his father his life; it concerns the feeling he has
of himself as a spiritual exile - a man who had intended to
emigrate but who had remained as an outsider in the land that meant
so much to him. He is fascinated by the experience of a local
piper, whose finding of a lost glen that had a strange beauty and
primordial freshness had been translated into a pibroch. The
haunting tune acts as a stimulant to Ewan's Hamlet-like musings on
the possibility of a rejuvenation of the landscape or a final
disappearance of its life and meaning. The antipathy between the
two main protagonists leads to a physical struggle between them
that brings to an end a novel, layered with meanings, that is more
a symbolic drama than a novel of realism. One of the earliest
novels to appear in the Scottish Literary Renaissance of the 1920s
and 1930s, "The Lost Glen" turns its back on the form of writing
that had depicted Scotland as a rural paradise in favour of
describing Highland life as it really was at that time.
General
Imprint: |
Whittles Publishing
|
Country of origin: |
United Kingdom |
Release date: |
October 2007 |
First published: |
October 2007 |
Authors: |
Neil Gunn
|
Dimensions: |
198 x 127 x 14mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback - Trade
|
Pages: |
256 |
Edition: |
4th Revised edition |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-904445-43-2 |
Categories: |
Books >
Fiction >
General & literary fiction >
Modern fiction
|
LSN: |
1-904445-43-8 |
Barcode: |
9781904445432 |
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