THE SHADOW

The Shadow (1948) follows the path made by The Green Isle in its attack on the effects of analytic reason used as a weapon of destruction. It was written at a time when to be a communist was fashionable; Gunn knew several devoted disciples of Marx.

Nan, who spent the war years in London, is staying in the Highlands with her Aunt Phemie to recover from a nervous breakdown. The first section of the book consists of her letters, most of them never sent, to her lover Ranald in the city. The second section deals with Ranald's visit to the patient, and his spiky relationship with Aunt Phemie.

Ranald is a ruthlessly intellectual Marxist who despises emotional weakness and defines freedom as the recognition of necessity. As Phemie reflects, ‘A person like Ranald could talk to the men there, to the farm workers, and find out about everything, and have a scheme for putting things right, but he does not somehow care for the men themselves.’ (SH 218). His merciless precision excludes the very qualities which make human life emotionally meaningful.

Nan has acquired from Ranald's revolutionary coterie a horror of this world of Know-Alls. She explores the fields, hills and streams, observing every detail of light and life in an effort to dispel the shadow from her mind. The observations are fresh, sharp and delicate – they are in fact those which Gunn himself had been making throughout the war years for a column in the Scots Magazine designed to reassure folk under the stress of bombing, privation and worry, that the natural world is permanent and alive. These notes were eventually published in book form as Highland Pack in 1949.

Two events shake Nan's growing confidence: the savage murder of an old man in the neighbourhood, and a series of meetings with a predatory artist whose passion for immediate gratification is as deadly in a contrasting way as Ranald's cold intellectual arrogance. A final meeting causes Nan's collapse, and the letters cease.

There are passages in the letters which hold attention and refresh the mind – ‘The yellow crocus was a tuning fork out of some sunny underworld, still holding the glow of the note’ – and her veering moods of joy, terror, wonder and dismay are described with a hallucinatory force.