NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2016 BY NEWSWEEK, NPR, THE GUARDIAN, THE TELEGRAPH, AND THE SUNDAY TIMES
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE
"THOUGHT PROVOKING FICTION"—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
A brutal triple murder in a remote Scottish farming community in 1869 leads to the arrest of seventeen-year-old Roderick Macrae. There is no question that Macrae committed this terrible act. What would lead such a shy and intelligent boy down this bloody path? And will he hang for his crime?
Presented as a collection of documents discovered by the author, His Bloody Project opens with a series of police statements taken from the villagers of Culdie, Ross-shire. They offer conflicting impressions of the accused; one interviewee recalls Macrae as a gentle and quiet child, while another details him as evil and wicked. Chief among the papers is Roderick Macrae’s own memoirs where he outlines the series of events leading up to the murder in eloquent and affectless prose. There follow medical reports, psychological evaluations, a courtroom transcript from the trial, and other documents that throw both Macrae’s motive and his sanity into question.
Graeme Macrae Burnet’s multilayered narrative—centered around an unreliable narrator—will keep the reader guessing to the very end. His Bloody Project is a deeply imagined crime novel that is both thrilling and luridly entertaining from an exceptional new voice.
I really liked the premise of this book, and I thought the author did a lot with the unreliable narrator trope. That's something I tend to respond well to generally, and I thought it was well-executed. Roderick's narrative was very believable to me - he was so straightforward and matter-of-fact and seemingly didn't shy away from admitting to wrongdoing. However, some of the other documents throw his veracity into question, and the reader is positioned essentially as the jury: we must decide what to believe based only on the contradictory and incomplete evidence presented to us. The interrogation of morality, insanity, and culpability in the commission of crimes reminded me a lot of the Scottish novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published 55 years before this novel takes place.
I found this a sympathetic portrayal of poor rural life. I felt sympathetic towards the inhabitants of Culduie, who owned no land, whose crops were fickle, and who could not afford their rent. It's a fairly depressing, desolate way of life, and it's easy to see how that desperation can lead to violence for perceived lack of alternatives. The town's constable is no better off than the rest of its residents, and the taste of power granted by the position can (and does) corrupt. Though the village only has fifty-five residents, its political climate is tense and complex. The tensions between the villagers and the educated, professional men was also very interesting: those of the middle and upper classes could not truly comprehend the nature of the dispute between the Macraes and Mackenzies, throwing the fairness of the trial into question.
So while there were a lot of interesting, thoughtful elements here, this wasn't exactly a page-turner. I didn't necessarily find it dull, but some sections were arduous. There's a reason most people normally read news articles about trials and not word-for-word transcripts. I was also unconvinced by the framing of the book. Though this is a work of fiction, the introduction states that these are real historical documents compiled by the author. However, this doesn't make sense, realistically: a non-fiction novel about the events would have some sort of narrative and/or central argument, it wouldn't consist only of a series of documents. It's not that I mind a more epistolary approach, I just think it would have been better without the introduction, because that framing device doesn't totally work for me.
