The majority of those who had read all three parts seem to have agreed with the Glasgow Herald in the judgment that is still, I think, standard among ‘common readers’: ‘Sunset Song stands by itself, a good novel; Cloud Howe and Grey Granite are two rather ramshackle outhouses which have been added to it.’ This, however, is to forget that Gibbon had planned a trilogy from the first, 4 and to ignore the fact that each of the outhouses has its own effective structure, however different from nineteenth-century and Edwardian norms. Like all creative writers Gibbon had not worked out the total shape right at the start; once begun, the novels flowed with their own momentum and took on new features as he wrote. That his original title for Cloud Howe was The Morning Star indicates that he cannot at first have thought of organizing it around contrasting cloud-formations passing over the vale of the Mearns, but perhaps around heavenly bodies ironically conceived. And when he came to grips with Grey Granite he scrapped his original plan of a Prelude that would make the beginning of Grey Granite formally parallel to those of the earlier novels, with their milieux firmly set in place and time (this is given in the Appendix). The result is that Duncairn has depth, history, and background only for those in the know; for them, Gibbon’s city is more like Aberdeen than Dundee, Glasgow or Edinburgh, and the glancing identifications and allusions provide, quietly and unobtrusively, many of the in-jokes of which Gibbon was so fond.5 For the wider readership, Duncairn is an imaginary city, the crumbling backdrop to the personal and political paradigms set within it. The novel has thus a much freer form than Sunset Song, framed by Prelude and Epilude; its frame consists of two passages about Chris, where interior monologue deftly incorporates third-person narration. With the first, we begin in medias res with Chris—‘old at thirty-eight?’—puffing and panting as she lugs her groceries up the urban height of the Windmill Steps, and end with her in the countryside, above the croft she has ‘retired to’, enigmatically losing consciousness on top of the Barmekin.

When Gibbon began Sunset Song he told his wife the whole trilogy was to be written round ‘a woman’,6 and the framing just mentioned seems to show that this is as true of Grey Granite as it is of the earlier novels. But Chris, though as moving and convincing as ever, is in a sense peripheral to the main action, the growth and development of her son Εwan, which parallels and contrasts with her own rural adolescence in Sunset Song. The book’s four sections are called after different constituents of granite: Epidote (a greenish silicate of calcium, aluminium, and iron), Sphene (whose crystals are wedge-shaped and which contains the element titanium—strong, light, corrosion-resistant), Apatite (consisting of calcium phosphate and fluoride), and Zircon (‘a tetragonal mineral, of which jacinth and jargoon are varieties’—jacinth is reddish orange, and jargoon brilliant and colourless). They mirror the stages in Ewan’s transformation into the kind of person required by the stark, sure creed that will cut like a knife: