Sunset Song has been voted Scotland’s favourite book in a new poll, finishing ahead of the creators of Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes and Miss Jean Brodie.
And anybody who watched TV in Scotland in the 1970s will recall Vivien Heilbron in the adaptation of the Lewis Grassic Gibbon novel.
As the heroine Chris Guthrie, one of the strongest female characters in literature, Heilbron was tough and she was tender; feisty and flirtatious; intelligent and intuitive.
While her family and friends were being dragged away from the fictional parish of Kinraddie to fight in the First World War, Chris stuck to her philosophy the land will endure.
To that extent, she wasn’t just a powerful woman. She was Mother Nature herself.
Heilbron said: “I went from playing an aristocratic German countess to appearing as this Scottish peasant girl, so it was a big contrast, but it turned into one of those productions where everything came together.
“I was from Glasgow, so I had to learn to speak the [Doric] language, because that was so important, but some of the cast were from the north-east, so they helped me in every way.
“It’s a long time since I played Chris [she returned in the second and third parts of the trilogy, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite in the 1980s], but she was such a fascinating character.
“Chris has to be this big mass of contradictions: she goes through all these different emotions of love, loss, anger, humour, darkness and rebirth and we see her develop from a young woman into adulthood.
“The book and their heroine deserve their place in history. There is no better description of the way all these young men from small villages went off to fight in a war, which most of them didn’t understand, and from which so many never returned. That is one of the reasons it carries so much resonance.”
As a Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford, Heilbron has travelled all over the world. And she has heard praise for Sunset Song in many different locations.
As she said: “There is a universality about Sunset Song which strikes a chord. I remember talking to somebody in Greece and he was raving about the book and I asked him why.
“He simply said: ‘It tells the story of peasants the world over’ and I understood what he meant.
“What was wonderful was that Grassic Gibbon is specific about the countryside, the people and the language of the Mearns, but his message isn’t parochial.
“He was only 33 when he died [in 1935]. But he’s responsible for a masterpiece which will live forever.”
Heilbron’s own copy of the novel is understandably dog-eared after decades of dipping in and out of the pages. But she shares some of Chris Guthrie’s redoubtable spirit and won’t let go once she is on a mission.
It may be a long time since she was studying at at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. But nobody knows better than her that all the world’s a stage!