In 1934 fascism seemed in the ascendant in Europe, and possible even in Britain. Beyond the novel’s open end there lies for Ewan, as Gibbon saw it, a brief spell as a full-time communist organizer and a long period when he would ‘hunger, work illegally, and be anonymous’, through ‘a generation of secret agitation and occasional terrorism’. As things actually turned out in Britain and the world, Ewan might well have fought in Spain with the International Brigade, then spent several years as a industrial organizer in Scotland and the English midlands before ending up as one of the leaders of the British Communist Party. But in both the Ewan-Trease vision of a fascist Britain and the ‘real’ future, Ewan would have had to live through the Moscow trials and the Stalin purges: he would have had to justify what he knew to be false in the interest of what his theory told him was the lesser evil. Many communists tricked themselves into believing that the accused were always guilty, that there were only a very few labour camps, that socialist planning in the East was economically successful. Ewan, as Gibbon presents him, would have faced up to the truth in private and deliberately suppressed it for the public. And if the communists had come to power in Britain, a mature Ewan, given his attitude to ends and means at the end of Grey Granite, might have been capable of sending comrades and rivals to their deaths after a show trial—or else of stoically signing his own confession if the Party decided that he was the one to be sacrificed.

It is Ewan’s final scene with Ellen that shows the New Man most appallingly in action. Though Ellen is depicted critically—she is about to ‘sell out’ to ordinary values—yet she was after all the person who helped him through his psychological crisis after police torture, and she is consistently straight and above board in her dealings with others. Ewan rejects her in the most brutal way possible:

But what are you doing out here with me? I can get a prostitute anywhere … He stood looking at her coolly, not angered, called her a filthy name, consideringly, the name a keelie gives to a leering whore; and turned and walked down the hill from her sight.

As Deirdre Burton has put it, ‘It is that recourse to the irrelevant insults of sexuality that finally marks Ewan out as the person of limited vision, limited growth—both personal and political.’11 Yet, horrified, we empathize with him in his rejection. Writing with hindsight in the years after communism’s collapse from within, one is impressed by Gibbon’s refusal to endorse Ewan’s ethics in this scene, and by the deft impressionism with which he portrays his flawed hero.

Because ideas play such a large part in A Scots Quair there has been a tendency for critics to impose an abstract ‘meaning’ on the trilogy as a whole. What is certain is that, as Edwin Muir put it, Gibbon ‘was firmly convinced that man once lived a life of innocence and happiness’ in the Golden Age of the Gay Hunters; ‘but all his impetuous energy was concentrated on drawing the vital conclusion from this, which was that by breaking the bonds imprisoning him man can live again.’ He certainly believed that revolutionary communism was the sword to cut those bonds; but he had also, to continue with Muir’s appreciation, ‘a passionate devotion to such things as truth, justice and freedom, and a belief in their ultimate victory that nothing could shake’.12 In the beginning he seems to have seen the Quair as propaganda for socialist action (‘I am a revolutionary writer … all my books are explicit or implicit propaganda’, Letter in Left Review, February 1935); but the fact surely is that in the white heat of composition it turned into a method of thinking about contemporary morals and politics in aesthetic terms—thinking by means of the images which we call characters. Gibbon’s aesthetic thought points to conclusions somewhat different from the sort he was accustomed to formulate in articles or arguments with friends. As Ewan says: