The House with the Green Shutters

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Overall, The House with the Green Shutters was fascinating. I found it interesting in the sense that at the intro, I accepted that I wasn't going to like the main character--and, I assumed, the protagonist. Gourlay Sr., however, is not what I would call a protagonist.

The novel describes the struggles of a proud and taciturn carrier, John Gourlay, against the spiteful comments and petty machinations of the envious and idle villagers of Barbie (the "bodies"). (Introduction by Wikipedia)

GEORGE DOUGLAS

Chapter XXIII. John is expelled from the university. What with the serious illnesses of Janet and Mrs Gourlay, the family is on the brink of financial ruin. Tres puntos están en la base de mis problemas con la novela. En primer lugar, la falta de matices en los personajes, todos ellos, y cuando digo todos quiero decir todos, son absolutamente planos. Ni siquiera el hecho de que abunden los hijos de puta en esta feria de las vanidades escocesa puede servir para compensar tal carencia. Y aunque el melodramático final tampoco aporta mucho, por encima de todo, me ha desagradado el tono elegido en la narración. La mala leche que abunda en la novela hubiera tenido un cauce mucho más adecuado en el sarcasmo, en la sátira, incluso en el cinismo, características presentes en los diálogos pero que se echan mucho de menos en la voz del narrador que tiene un marcado acento moralizante.

The mother and sister convinced the authorities that Gourlay, falling from a ladder and striking his head, had died accidentally; but John was lost. For days, he was haunted by red eyes glaring at him out of space, by unknown things coming to get him. Dependent upon him for their livelihood, his mother and sister tried to get him out of his madness, but nothing soothed him except whiskey, and that only briefly. One day he asked his mother for money, bought his last bottle of whiskey and a vial of poison, and ended his wretched existence. George Douglas Brown was born in 1869 in the little village of Ochiltree, near Mauchline in Ayrshire. The illegitimate son of a local farmer and the unlettered daughter of an Irish labourer, he was raised by his mother and educated at the village primary school. When he progressed to secondary education the rector of Ayr Academy helped him to gain a bursary to the University of Glasgow where he graduated in 1891 with first class honours and the Snell Exhibition Scholarship to Balliol. He took a lively part in Oxford student life, but his studies in Classics were interrupted by periods of ill-health and depression. He returned to Ochiltree in1895 to look after his dying mother and graduated later that year with a third class degree and plans to take up a career as a freelance journalist in London. Craig, Cairns (1980), Fearful Selves: Character, Community and the Scottish Imagination, in Cencrastus No. 4, Winter 1980–81, pp.29 – 32, ISSN 0264-0856 The House with the Green Shutters is a novel by the Scottish writer George Douglas Brown, first published in 1901 by John MacQueen. Set in mid-19th century Ayrshire, in the fictitious town of Barbie which is based on his native Ochiltree, it consciously violates the conventions of the sentimental kailyard school, and is sometimes quoted as an influence on the Scottish Renaissance. Marred as it is by errors of over-emphasis and a desire to compensate for the unthinking nostalgia of so much kailyard, The House with the Green Shutters is the testament of a young man who grew up in bitter poverty, the stigma of his illegitimacy never far from his mind, who worked his way, through ability and hard study, to Ayr Academy, to Glasgow and to Oxford. In the kailyard, he would have risen to the highest honours; in real life, after interrupting his studies to nurse his dying mother through cancer, Brown took a poor degree, wrote much journalism, some fiction and this superb ‘apologia’, and died.

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They gazed with blanched faces at the House with the Green Shutters, sitting there dark and terrible, beneath the radiant arch of the dawn.