It is difficult to use the words 'like' or 'enjoyed' about a book this unremittingly grim. However, one can appreciate good writing, and the psychological profiles offered. The book subverts the Kailyard school of - where happy rural communities come together beside bonnie briar bushes. In Barbie, the fictional Ayrshire town where The House with Green Shutters sits, the community of 'bodies' is a malignant Greek chorus spreading gossip and watching with undisguised glee as the haulage empire of the town bully Jack Gourlay crumbles around him and he and his weak-minded family are driven to various types of insanity.

So not a cheery read then. But it is the antecedent of strain of Scottish realism, written in the vernacular, that has given rise to everything from [b:Sunset Song|1203812|Sunset Song |Lewis Grassic Gibbon|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1359617860s/1203812.jpg|2555083] to [b:Train Spotting|16650491|Railway Top Spots Revisiting the Top Train Spotting Destinations of Our Childhood. Julian Holland|Julian Holland|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1358759103s/16650491.jpg|22857267]. ( )

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.

Brown introduced character after character that was not someone I would ever, ever want to spend physical time with (although some of them were amusing, and many had odd little quirks that made observing them worthwhile). The small handful of likeable characters were present for only a small portion of the novel. Mostly it was like watching a train wreck--awful people with awful situations, but I just couldn't look away.

Truthfully, it did drag in some places. Gourlay Jr.'s drunken musings are not exactly thrilling, but the narrator recognizes that (and scorns him for it--the narrator's not exactly a nice person, either) and moves the story along as best he can. The ending was horrendous, but mostly in a Shakespearean tragedy kind of way. Murder, madness, and suicide. ( )

[Preface to the World’s Classics edition, Oxford University Press, 1938; reprinted in A Traveller in Romance, ed. John Whitehead, Clarkson N. Potter, 1984, pp. 82-86:]

The fame of George Douglas Brown rests on one novel. The author of The House with the Green Shutters was born at Ochiltree, in the County of Ayrshire, on 26 January 1869; he died in London at the house of his friend Andrew Melrose on 28 August 1902. Shortly after his death a memoir of him was written by Cuthbert Lennox, and it is from this and from the reminiscences of Andrew Melrose that I have gathered the information that I now set before the reader. But it is not easy, either from the memoirs or the reminiscences, to tell what sort of man he was. George Douglas – it is more convenient to call him by the name by which readers knew him – was ill-favoured.

[…]

On leaving [Balliol College, Oxford], he settled in London to make his living by his pen. A free-lance journalist, he wrote reviews, fill-ups, poems, short stories, a Life of Kruger for serialization in The Morning Leader and under the pen-name of Kennedy King, a boys’ book. He seems to have earned enough at least to provide himself with the bare necessities of existence. Meanwhile ‘he kept steadily in view his determination to do well in literature’. Hundreds of young men, bred in circumstances not unlike those of George Douglas, come up to London every year, struggle into journalism and have the ambition to write a novel or a play that will bring them fame and fortune. Few achieve it. The difficulty of earning their bread and butter, the press of work in an overcrowded profession, lack of talent and weakness of character prevent them. But George Douglas had energy of mind and strength of will. […] But it was not till he had been in London for five years that he wrote a story of about twenty thousand words which he called The House with the Green Shutters. He read it to two of his friends. They thought well of it, but he had packed so much matter in so small a space that they were left with an impression of excessive strain, and they strongly advised him to extend it to a full-length novel. This he agreed to do. A year later he finished the book in the form which we now know.

The public at the time was interested in Scottish stories; the Kailyard School, as it came to be called, was at the height of its vogue, and The House with the Green Shutters was taken on its publication to be an effective counterblast to the sentimentality that characterized the group. ‘I love the book for just this’, said Walter Raleigh, ‘it sticks the Kailyarders like pigs.’ Their productions are dead now.

[…]

Barrie’s A Window in Thrums is a little different from either of these [The Bonnie Brier Bush by Ian Maclaren and The Lilac Sunbonnet by S. R. Crockett]. For one thing it is better written. Barrie was not only a sentimentalist, there was a harsh, sardonic side to him too, and there is a chapter in this book in which he reproduces the gossiping of two women, mother and daughter, with a fidelity that is empty of benevolence. It might almost be a chapter from The House with the Green Shutters and you feel that Barrie was within a hair’s breadth of writing as cruel and bitter a book as that. He could well have done it. But, perhaps thinking better of it, he took a header into the milk of human kindness and the reader, before he reaches the final chapter, is splashed with it from head to foot. But Barrie’s personages are made of stuff much less stern than Ian Maclaren’s. They greet sair. Separately or in couples they hide themselves in corners to have a good cry. They are, however, no less virtuous and God-fearing.

George Douglas saw his fellow Scots very differently. He wrote a savage book.

I will say little about The House with the Green Shutters. There is no obligation on anyone to read a novel. A novel is read for pleasure; some of us take our pleasures in one way, some in another; some pleasures may be intellectual or they may be fatuous; and it may be allowed that a novel that gives you an intellectual pleasure is of a higher quality than one that merely excites your laughter or holds you by its thrilling story; but the pleasure it gives you is the only test and so every reader is an ultimate judge. A critic may point out that a novel is well-written, well-constructed, and that it succeeds in doing what the author set out to do. But he can do no more; and if you think War and Peace tedious or Red and Black unpleasant that is your own affair. You have just as much right to your opinion as he has. He may despise you because you do not share his, but you must leave him, with a shrug of your shoulders, to the harmless enjoyment of his contempt; and you can always console yourself with the reflection that, as the history of criticism shows, the best critics are often very much mistaken.

It would be absurd to class The House with the Green Shutters with either of the great novels I have just mentioned. It is a young man’s first effort. Its faults are obvious and George Douglas was not unconscious of them. When his friend Melrose pointed them out to him, he answered: ‘I believe you are right, but I have a feeling now that this book has got to go as it is.’ A writer seldom writes as he would like to; he writes as he can; he is often aware of his defects, but he can rid himself of them as little as he can change the colour of his eyes. They are part of what he is. George Douglas wrote in anger rather than with sympathy. There is not a single character in his novel that is not base, cruel, mean, drunken, or stupid. In fierce contradiction to the characters of the Kailyard novelists who are all white, he made his all black, and in the end the reader believes in them as little as he believes in the others.

Experience of life teaches us that few people are all of a piece; they are an intricate mingling of good and bad. Douglas loaded the dice against the persons of his invention. Even when by their own fault catastrophe has befallen them so that common charity inclines you to commiseration, he takes care to make them so vile in their adversity that you cannot even then feel any pity for them. But they are alive. They are creatures of nightmare, and they have the vividness, the actuality of the people that we see in our dreams. And it must be admitted that the impression of power that the book gives is much heightened by the dark colours in which the characters are painted. They lend it a grim intensity of horror. It is not life that he offers, it is a stylized picture deliberately composed in sombre tones; and such is his force, so swift his narrative, and inevitable the catastrophe which his story leads to, that while you read you are held captive by the author’s passionate belief in his own creations

The House with the Green Shutters is the only novel George Douglas wrote. Its success was in some measure due to Andrew Lang who wrote appreciative reviews of it in a number of papers. Presently George Douglas found himself the most talked-of man in the literary circles of London. For the first time in his life he had a little money to spend. He was thirty-two. A year later he was dead.

[…]

It is vain to speculate whether, had he lived, George Douglas would have written other books of merit or whether, like so many, he was a man who had just one thing to say and having said it could have done no more than repeat himself. He had vigour of mind, acid humour, a gift for so telling a story that the reader is led from page to page by a desire to know what is going to come next (the greatest gift the pure novelist can have) and the power of creating living persons of such idiosyncrasy that they remain long in the memory. He wrote, if not with beauty, with correctness and lucidity. He had imagination. His defects, lack of sympathy and lack of insight, a tendency to moralize, were the defects of youth. He had enough strength of character to surmount them. But it was a small world that he described; it may be doubted whether the life he led in London, the life of the Bohemian journalist, with its idle sauntering and interminable talk, its pub-crawling, late hours and capricious industry, would ever have given him the chance to know the people of an ampler world with the intimacy with which he knew his native Scottish and so the occasion to recreate them with his fierce and trenchant individuality. At the time of his death he was at work on a love story, a romance of Cromwell’s time; it is hard to believe that it was a fit theme to exercise his grim power. The news of his death came as a shock not only to his friends, but to the public. It seemed tragic that a writer so young, who after years of struggle had just had such a wonderful success, when the world seemed to lie at his feet, should so suddenly perish. Those who have lived long in the world of letters know how much more tragic is the fate of those who have enjoyed a success that they have never been able to repeat. It may be that his death spared him that bitterness.

A Greek tragedy. There's actually a Chorus of 'bodies', the first time I've ever seen this done in modern fiction and it works well. At one point he follows Euripides' Suppliant Women word for word. I wouldn't have noticed but it was the last book I read. Annoyingly, now I come to write this, I can't find the passage in either book.

It is beautifully written. "...the slaver slid unheeded along the cutties... white-mutched grannies were keeking past the jambs...". Great stuff. Completely unintelligible of course, but there's a good glossary at the back (and a good introduction which can't be read before the novel as it gives away every plot point). I perhaps had less trouble with the dialect that some would as I can understand Geordie, though not speak it. It was interesting to see ‘div’ for ‘do’. The Geordies don’t have that, they have ‘de’, but they do have ‘divn’t’ for ‘don’t’. I’d never really considered what happened to the counterpart.

It’s a dark book. Truly dark. It’s not like Brown has gone for anything so superficial as a dark mood. I think he has a dark soul. It’s also a very good book and I’d recommend it to anyone. If I had to find a flaw I’d say he sometimes lacks complete control of his authorial voice, but it was only his second novel. Such a shame that he was dead by the time he was my age. I think we’ve been denied a number of superb novels. ( )

This was a tragic book in the main. Following the Gourlay family left me with a negative reaction. It displayed a family often surrounded by evil, bitterness and angry, and completely dis-functional. It is not a book I would personally recommend, unless it offers a fair description of a particular time in Scottish social history to students of that era. ( )