In the borderlands of lunacy
A Booker-shortlisted tale of a savage killing in a Highlands village has turned Graeme Macrae Burnet into a literary rock star.
A tale of a savage killing in a Highlands village has turned Graeme Macrae Burnet into a literary rock star.
The flaughter and croman looked natural in the hands of young Highlander Roderick Macrae as he strolled through his village of Culduie one morning in 1869. Respectively a long-handled spade for harvesting peat and a pickaxe for breaking ground, they were familiar tools of crofting life. And despite his academic aptitude, teenage Roddy was destined to follow in his father’s footsteps, eking out a living working the land of their laird.
But when Roddy walked back down the path, he was bathed in blood. “I killed Lachlan Broad,” he calmly told Carmina Smoke. The tiny village would never be the same, especially when Kenny Smoke found more than one body in the Broad house.
Despite the heinous triple murder and sensational trial, until recently few people knew the story of Roderick Macrae. The publication of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, has definitely changed that.
Burnet’s second novel, it’s a riveting historical whydunnit that plants readers among the dirt and injustice of Victorianera crofting life. Consisting of documents relating to Roddy’s trial – newspaper
clippings, witness statements, a psychologist’s report and a prison memoir – it required countless hours in libraries and archives.
“I explored the history and way of life of crofting communities, contemporary thinking on criminal psychology and the workings of the Scottish legal system,” he says. “Luckily, I really enjoy research, particularly when you can examine yellowed, handwritten documents. That stuff really gives you a feeling for the period.”
Burnet – a former television researcher and English teacher – stumbled across Roddy’s story while combing through the Highland Archives in Inverness for information on his own grandfather. Donald “Tramp” Macrae was born a few miles from Culduie 20 years after Roddy’s trial. Newspaper clippings piqued Burnet’s interest, but what formed the impetus for His Bloody Project was the discovery of Roddy’s eloquent jailhouse memoir – at the time some considered it a hoax; others said it was evidence of a cruel system driving a man to madness.
For a full half of the book – described by the Booker judges as “rich, brooding, difficult to classify and utterly compelling” – readers get inside the mind of a young murderer. Roddy is matter-of-fact about his brutal crime and the events leading up to it. He doesn’t seem to care about the fight going on among others as to whether his life should end with a noose or in an asylum. But how much of what Roddy writes can we believe? Especially given the varying accounts of others?
In reality, none of it is true: His Bloody Project is a novel – even if it’s snugly draped in the guise of a true crime exposé (so much so that some early reviews wrongly classified it as such). Burnet confesses he enjoys playing with readers’ perceptions. His critically acclaimed 2014 debut, The Disappearance of Adele Beaudeau, was purported to be Burnet’s translation of a rediscovered cult French novel.
“In His Bloody Project, I go to great lengths to make the ‘found’ documents seem real, and yet I want the novel to be understood as a work of fiction,” he explains. “In both my novels, I want the reader to feel immersed in the milieu of the book and to engage with the characters on an emotional level, yet I draw attention to the fact that these worlds are an artifice. I think these kinds of contradictions are engaging for readers.”
Burnet enjoys reading books in which not all the answers are provided, where there’s room for readers to make up their own minds. He says the “found documents” structure of His Bloody Project allows readers “to make up their own minds about what actually happened, why Roddy committed his dark deeds and whether he’s insane or not”.
Insanity and obsession are strong threads in both Burnet novels. J Bruce Thomson, the psychologist who examines Roddy (blurring lines again; there was a real-life Scottish prison psychologist of the time with that name), describes his work as “travels in the borderlands of lunacy”. But Burnet says such themes arose organically, not intentionally.
“I’ve had a strong interest in madness for as long as I can remember. I’m also interested in paranoia, and how people live under oppressive regimes. I think these are fertile territories for a novelist. Story and character definitely come first for me, but I suppose it’s only natural that the kinds of stories I find myself telling reflect my own preoccupations.”
Burnet has been warmly embraced by the Tartan Noir community as well as the Booker judges. His latest work has been favourably compared to a dark classic of Scottish literature, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. But he says his greatest literary influence is the prolific Belgian crime writer Georges Simenon, creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret.
“Simenon wrote around 200 novels, and is a master craftsman of fiction.
He had an unsurpassed ability to evoke a sense of place through very precise, unflashy prose. He also delves deeply into the psyche of his central characters. To me, he’s less a crime writer than a psychological writer. But something that’s less commonly remarked on is the way he handles time.”
In a Simenon novel, Burnet says, the protagonist’s past is always bearing down on the story, and this weight is keenly felt in His Bloody Project. “It’s an inescapable force, which determines the actions of his characters and creates a sense of inevitability that pervades Simenon’s work. In my own writing, I want readers to have the sense, at the end of the book, that while they might wish the outcome to have been otherwise, it could not end any other way.”
HIS BLOODY PROJECT by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Text, $26)
“I want the reader to feel immersed in the milieu of the book and to engage with the characters on an emotional level.”