'His Bloody Project' (2015) Graeme Macrae Burnet

It's been a long time since I've written on this blog. It should have been added to at least twice (Jane Eyre  and Olive Ketteridge if you were asking) and possibly more, but as the Man Booker Prize short list has been compiled, this seems as good a time as any to start the blog up again.

I will cut to the chase: this novel is superb. Set in a village on Scotland's West Coast, it consists of 'Documents relating to the case of Roderick Macrae.' The first part is Roderick Macrae's testimony written in prison whilst he awaited trial; the second part is a summary of the court case. Mixed in are witness testimonies and medical reports.

This novel has echoes of The Collector by John Fowles and Engleby by Sebastian Faulks as we are treated to a protagonist (at least in the first section) who is guilty of heinous crimes. However, whereas Frederick Clegg in The Collector is downright sinister, and Engleby is unusual to say the least from the opening, Roderick Macrae is someone that the reader empathises with and roots for in the trial.

There is so much that can be read into this novel. There is ample opportunity for a Marxist critique of how the village shares land; one could write a dissertation on the questionable madness of Roderick Macrae; the evident research of the author to explore what life was like in the highlands in the 1800s gives a fascinating insight into Scottish rural history.

I cannot write too much about the way the novel goes in terms of its storyline as it twists, turns and teases the reader. The fact that you do not know who two of the antihero's victims are until late on adds to the intrigue installed by Graeme Macrae Burnet. I finished this two days ago - I still do not know how I feel about Roderick by the end which by my reckoning is not a bad thing.

I wrote on one of the football forums that I frequent that I thought that this was an 8.5/10 novel. However, what am I marking it down on? I don't think that there is much wrong with that novel whatsoever. It was a surprise entry for the Booker Prize, with the novelist being relatively unknown and the publishing house not being one of the big hitters. However, not unlike its setting it is a hidden gem. Not everyone will have heard of it but when they experience it they will remember it for a long time.



As a footnote, after reading this I rushed to Amazon to buy Graeme Macrae Burnet's debut novel, The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau. After seeing the paperbacks only being available for circa. £25, I disappeared faster than the unfortunate Adele.