Cold and controlled he had always been, some lirk in his nature and upbringing that Chris loved, who so hated folk in a fuss. But now that quality she’d likened to grey granite itself, that something she’d seen change in Duncairn from slaty grey to a glow of fire, was transmuting again before her eyes—into something darker and coarser, in essence the same, in tint antrin queer.

Gibbon’s theme reflects one of the commonest spiritual sequences of the thirties—the process whereby a bourgeois intellectual came to join the Communist Party and decided to give over his life to it. Many have felt with Isobel Murray that ‘the greatest weakness of the book is the character and role of Ewan’;7 others have seen in him its main strength. That was certainly Eric Linklater’s view before he had even finished it. He has left a unique record of his immediate responses in a letter written towards the end of 1934:

Chris, I think, has lost a little of the character—but she’s lost it to Ewan, who’s coming very robustly alive; & the curious angular growth of his mind is very true to type. So far I can sympathise with his nascent politics very comfortably, & if the police had behaved in that manner his bottle-throwing would have been not merely noble, but natural.8

The function of the granite symbolism is to highlight Ewan’s willed transformation into the ‘more than human’: Ewan comes to be like granite just as Stalin means steel and Molotov means hammerman. He inherits from Chris a still centre, a refusal to be anything other than himself, an aloofness that others find unsympathetic and haughty. He respects what Gibbon sees as the cool detachment of science and is utterly blind to the arts; his sense of humour is, to put it mildly, limited, and at one point Chris says, ‘human beings were never of much interest to him.’ Yet it would be wrong to say he is emotionless; it is merely that he can keep his ordinary feelings under control—his admiring affection for Chris, his detestation of what breeds nauseous slums and stunts the wretched of the earth, his contempt for the inchoate, the indecisive, and the second-rate. His most intense emotions are those of the communist mystic, which come on him towards the end of the novel, an essentially religious identification with the enslaved and the exploited throughout recorded history. They are only made possible by what Ewan learns in the factory, the working-class movement, and the police cell, but they are rooted in a character trait he displayed even in boyhood, in his friendship for Charlie Cronin the spinner’s son and his strange bond with old Moultrie, survival from an age of pre-industrial knacks and skills, who on his deathbed shared with Ewan the precious essence of the old ways (Cloud Howe, Canongate Classics edition, p.192). They also link him to Chris and show that despite his crystalline hardness, his sensibility is akin to hers—to the Chris who in her girlhood saw visions of prehistoric hunters and farmers and identified with the tortured Covenanters in the Whigs’ Vault at Dunnottar.