Book description
Introduced by Cairns Craig. The most famous Scottish novel of the early
twentieth century, The House with the Green Shutters has remained a
landmark on the literary scene ever since it was first published in
1901. Determined to overthrow the sentimental 'kailyard' stereotypes of
the day, George Douglas Brown exposed the bitter pettiness of commercial
greed and small-town Scottish life as he himself had come to know it.
More than this, however, his novel lays bare the seductive and crippling
presence of patriarchal authority in Scottish culture at large,
symbolised by the terrible struggle between old John Gourlay and his
weak but imaginative son. Illuminated by lightning flashes of
descriptive brilliance, Brown's prose evokes melodrama, Greek tragedy
and postmodern alienation in a unique and unforgettably powerful reading
experience. 'Brown's masterpiece was practically the first Scottish
novel since Galt which dealt with nineteenth-century Scottish life as it
really was; to do this, and to get away from the sentimentalism of the
Kailyard, it had to be sharply, almost brutally realistic.' Kurt Wittig,
The Scottish Tradition in Literature
