ABSTRACT
Extenuation is almost explicit in the part played by gossip in John Gourlay's downfall: The bodies of Barbie became not only the chorus to Gourlay's tragedy, buzzing it abroad and discussing his downfall; they became also, merely by their maddening tattle, a villain of the piece and an active cause of the catastrophe. Neil Gunn's reputation as 'the most important Scottish novelist of the twentieth century', based on a corpus of some twenty volumes of fiction mainly centred on life in the Scottish Highlands, has been largely eclipsed by growing appreciation of Grassic Gibbon's epic achievement in the trilogy. Scottish writers of fiction in the first half of the twentieth century divide into several groups. The epic journey is a recurrent motif with Roddie Sinclair's herring-fishing expedition to Stornoway providing a pivotal episode whose consequences are felt by all the main characters. John Buchan's adventure stories demonstrate that for good entertainment something must be at stake.
