‘His Bloody Project’ by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Contraband)
This is one of the 13 novels long-listed for the prestigious Man Booker prize for 2016. Given that the judges had to read 155 novels to arrive at their long list, to be one of the final 13 is clearly a substantial achievement. Will it win? I think not. In fact I shall be surprised should it make in on to the short list. (Surprise, surprise! I got that one quite wrong – ‘His Bloody Project’ has just made it to the short list of six.)
On the other hand, it is not difficult to see why this ‘truly ingenious thriller’ and ‘gripping crime story’ caught and kept the judges’ interest. A familiar critical debate has recently been back in the news: is it fair to make a qualitative distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction? Is it true that crime fiction, science fiction, or genre fiction of any kind, is above all about ‘entertaining’ the reader, while it is only in literary fiction that he or she will encounter a serious, creative exploration of human life and experience? The hugely successful Scottish crime writer Val McDermid is among those who choose to reject this distinction: ‘In recent years,’ she writes, ‘most readers and critics have acknowledged the blurring of the outdated and misguided distinction between literary fiction and other genres’. Hence for her ‘it will be a “good day”…when a crime novel wins the Booker prize’. So presumably she sees the short-listing of ‘His Bloody Project’ as at least a step in the right direction.
This is Graeme Burnet’s second novel. His first, described by one critic as ‘a literary mystery novel’, appeared in 2014 and was well received. Most striking, perhaps, is its title page: ‘The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau by Raymond Brunet Translated and with an afterword by Graeme Macrae Burnet’. Few readers I guess will fail to notice the Brunet/Burnet parallel, backed up as it is by that between ‘Ray’ and ‘rae’. The 235 pages that follow purport to be the translation of Brunet’s sombre, even bleak, novel about disappearance, murder and suicide in a small French town.
In the final half-a-dozen pages, however, Graeme Burnet takes over to describe Brunet’s life and career. We learn of the initial success of ‘La Disparition d’Adele Bedeau’, its greater fame when a film version directed by Claude Chabrol is released, its author’s failure to produce a second novel, and his eventual suicide – which turns out to be identical to that of the protagonist in the original novel. In other words, Burnet is already inviting the reader to share his intriguing interest in such ‘literary’ issues as authenticity, truth, fiction and reality.
In ‘His Bloody Project’ exactly these issues re-emerge in even more striking fashion. Once again the book’s title page is clearly significant: ‘His Bloody Project, Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae, A Novel, Edited and introduced by Graeme Macrae Burnet’. The ambiguities here are obvious. In his first novel, Graeme Burnet had purported to be the translator of a French novel. Here he is apparently the editor of a range of documents concerning the trial for murder of a character called Roderick Macrae. Nonetheless the title page tells us unequivocally that what we are about to read is ‘A Novel’.
The ‘documents’ in question turn out to be statements made to the police by residents of the village of Culduie near Applecross in Wester Ross after Roderick Macrae’s killing of three residents of the village in 1869; an account of his life by Macrae himself written in his prison cell; medical reports concerning the prisoner’s mental state; a statement by a 19th-century criminologist, J. Bruce Thomson, concerning an interview we are told he had with Macrae in his cell; and finally long extracts from contemporary newspapers’ transcripts of Macrae’s trial.
In establishing this context for his novel, the author goes to extraordinary lengths to persuade us that what we are reading is all true. Exactly half the novel is taken up by what appears to be Macrae’s autobiography. However, in the book’s Preface, Burnet goes so far as to tell us that in 1869 a controversy arose over the authenticity of this account, and that comparisons were drawn with James Macpherson’s attempt to pass off his Ossianic poems as translations from the ancient Gaelic originals – and he cites an article from an 1869 issue of the Edinburgh Review to prove it. Similarly the criminologist J. Bruce Thomson proves to be an historical figure, and we are told he saw Macrae’s manuscript in his cell. For this and other reasons, having weighed up all the evidence, Burnet reassures us that ‘having examined the manuscript first-hand’, he has ‘no doubts as to its authenticity.’
Novelists from Daniel Defoe onwards have regularly tried to make the reader believe that the work of fiction he is reading is in fact ‘true’. But in modern and postmodern literature the debate over the fictional and the real has become a pervasive theme. Readers may recall that Martin MacInnes’s novel ‘Infinite Ground’ (reviewed in SR last week) entered once again into that debate. Now here is yet another young Scottish writer engaging with and exploring the same issue. In fact Scottish literature does have something of a tradition in this area. James Hogg’s 1824 novel ‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’ is the classic paradigm: and it has proved a model for subsequent novelists to follow. Emma Tennant’s ‘The Bad Sister’, for example is a re-writing of Hogg’s work from a feminist perspective, while both James Robertson’s ‘The Fanatic’ and ‘The Testament of Gideon Mack’, in a variety of ways, draw heavily on Hogg’s original.
Hogg employs two narrators in his novel, surrounding the personal narrative of Robert Wringhim (the fanatical Calvinist sinner) with the commentary of a modern-day ‘editor’ whose voice is that of the secular rationalism of the Scottish Enlightenment. With extraordinary skill, Hogg allows the reader finally to recognise the limitations and unreliability of both narrators, thus hinting at the complexity and elusiveness of reality itself. The structure of Burnet’s novel is almost identical: the autobiographical narrative of Roderick Macrae is enclosed within contradictory perspectives on the events in Macrae’s life. But by the end nothing has been explained; the reader is left with a sense only of the inscrutability of truth and reality.
However, Roderick Macrae’s autobiographical account is the heart of the novel. The life of a tiny crofting community in a remote part of the Highlands in the 19th century is vividly evoked. Roderick’s alienation from both his own family and the surrounding society emerges equally convincingly. His overbearing father, and the Lachlan Broad Mackenzie who is his threatening nemesis, are powerful presences. Equally Roderick’s account is lyrical in its depiction of landscape, atmosphere and setting.
Here he is near the beginning of his narrative: ‘The afternoon was very warm. The sky was clear and the hills across the Sound were various hues of purple. The air was so still it was possible to hear the lapping of the sea and the occasional cry of children playing far below in the village. The animals which I had been charged to watch were rendered slothful by the heat and did not stray far from one hour to the next. The stirks lazily flicked at horseflies with their tails’.
But of course there is a problem with all of this. And it is a problem present from this section of the novel’s opening sentence: ‘I am writing this at the behest of my advocate, Mr Andrew Sinclair, who since my incarceration here in Inverness has treated me with a degree of civility I in no way deserve’. Hardly the language and style (‘incarceration’?) of a 17-year-old boy from Wester Ross sitting in his prison cell in Inverness charged with the murder of three people. In the course of his account we learn that Roderick’s primary schoolteacher regarded him as a promising scholar meriting the further education his father denies him. But as we read on, it is increasingly clear we are reading the words not of the character Roderick Macrae but of the skilful novelist Graeme Burnet. Does it really matter?
In Hogg’s ‘Justified Sinner’ the difference between the two narrators is dramatically highlighted by the contrast between the language and style of their two accounts. Where the editor’s language is simple, prosaic, unadorned, that of Robert Wringhim is colourful, elaborate and poetic – steeped in the complex rhetoric of the religious tradition to which he belongs. Where the editor employs the language of scholarly, sceptical, scientific inquiry, Wringhim speaks out in the language of religious conviction and commitment. Thus contrasting worlds are juxtaposed.
Similarly in ‘His Bloody Project’ Graeme Burnet employs two different kinds of language (neatly caught perhaps in his challenging title). The language of the police reports, of the medical statements, of the fatuous commentaries by the criminologists and the theorising by the lawyers, remains dry, formal, unemotional, cold and distancing. Only in the literary language of Macrae’s account is the existential reality of human life and experience convincingly evoked. Only there is individual human feeling imaginatively created and explored.
The result is that the reader is made increasingly to identify and sympathise with the young man. We feel that however unfairly treated, he does his best to do what is right. We even begin to wish that he would be less accommodating – become more assertive. When he decides to leave Culduie and create a new life for himself in Glasgow we applaud – only to be disappointed when he soon gives up and creeps back home. But in the closing pages of his account everything changes. And this is where Burnet’s artful novel becomes more problematical.
Roderick’s sister – who is gifted with ‘second sight’ – tells him she has seen Lachlan Broad, the man who has raped her and is persecuting their family, in his winding sheet. So on the spot, the rather ineffectual Roderick decides to kill him – considering the problem of doing so significantly ‘in the spirit of a mathematician approaching a problem in algebra’. Picking up a ‘croman’ (a kind of pickaxe) and a ‘flaughter’ (a spade with a pointed blade), he proceeds through the village, enters Lachlan’s house, and in short order slaughters Lachlan’s 15-year-old daughter – with whom we had earlier learned he was falling in love – her three-year-old brother, and finally Lachlan himself.
His description of these deeds is horrifyingly detailed; the sickening impact of every blow is lovingly spelled out. Why? In the second half of the novel, 19th-century attempts to explain such horrors by invoking the existence of a subhuman criminal class, or of individuals suffering from a condition of ‘moral insanity’, are made to seem spurious and ludicrous. But Graeme Burnet offers nothing in their place. Rather, in dwelling upon every detail of Roderick’s murders, he is in danger of becoming complicit in the extreme violence he so meticulously describes. As so often in contemporary film, television and theatre, we are apparently being asked to look upon such horror as part of an inexplicable and inscrutable reality.
James Robertson has said that some readers will find the kind of fiction that leaves us with enigmas unresolved and unexplained frustrating – but such fiction simply mirrors real life. Well perhaps I’m that kind of reader. In any event, while admiring the novelist’s artistry and polish, I find something disturbing about Burnet’s fictional universe. But who knows? We’ll find out on 25 October whether the Man Booker prize judges disagree.
By Andrew Hook | 21 September 2016