Benbecula - Graeme Macrae Burnet

 Graeme Macrae Burnet broke through when His Bloody Project (reviewed on this blog back in 2017) was Booker nominated.   Benbecula is his contribution to Polygon's Darkland Tales, of which I have read and reviewed Val McDermid's slightly disappointing Queen Macbeth and Denise Mina's triumphant Rizzio.   Benbecula is in no way disappointing.   In fact it is very nearly as brilliant as Rizzio.   The fact is, it is exactly the same as His Bloody Project - bloody murder in the Highlands and Islands, apparently based on historical events.  Burnet has carved himself a niche in historical metafiction and has, so far, two strands: the French one (the Gorski trilogy) and the Scots one (another trilogy if we include this novella with His Bloody Project and Case Study.   I haven't read any of the Gorski books yet, but I wolfed down Benbecula in exactly the same way I devoured His Bloody Project.   In his curious, idiosyncratic way, Burnet is an absolute genius.

As ever, we are told straight away about the dark deed.   Narrator Malcolm MacPhee tells us his brother Angus murdered their father, mother and aunt, causing the isolated island community the shun what remained of the family.   Sister Marion and younger brother John couldn't take it and ran away to the bright lights of the Isle of Skye.   Malcolm lives on alone in his crofter's cottage, not bothering to do anything any more but brood and drink.   His rare visitors include Mrs Macleod, who insists he bathes once a month, and the local cleric who feels obliged even though Malcolm refuses to attend mass.

Malcolm relives his brother's downfall.   Angus was always unruly but he managed fine until Malcolm walked off a temporary job he had taken on a neighbouring island and Angus replaced him for a week or so.   Angus changed when he was away.   No one knows why.   When he came back across the sound at low tide he was chased and mocked by people from the other island.   He refused to work, frightened village girls, and one day started ringing the church bell for no reason whatsoever.  The family had to keep him tied up.   But he seemed to get better, and vigilance was relaxed until, again for no reason, he did what he did.   Now Angus is secure and forgotten in a madhouse on the mainland.

Is Malcolm a reliable narrator?  Who knows.   There is a lengthy Afterword in which Burnet points out differences in Malcolm's account in the book and what he and others said in their precognition statements for the court that tried Angus in Inverness in 1857.   But, of course, it was Burnet who chose to make those inconsistencies.   Are the records he claims to have used real or made up?   That is the beauty of Burnet's technique.   Personally I loved that he chose to cite precognition statements, a unique feature of Scottish Law.  (They do exist - I checked.)

His Bloody Project - Graeme Macrae Burnet

His Bloody Project didn't win the 2016 Man Booker Prize (I can't recall what did) but it outsold all the other novels on the shortlist. It purports to be a dossier of documents found by Burnet when researching his Macrae ancestors. The documents relate to the murder of Lachlan Mackenzie of Culduie in Ross-shire in August 1869, for which seventeen year-old Roderick Macrae was hanged in Inverness in September.


The documents consist of a handful of witness statements gathered by local police, the account which Roddy wrote at his solicitor's request whilst awaiting trial, a report (wonderfully entitled Travels in the Border-Lands of Lunacy) by J Bruce Thomson, resident surgeon at Perth prison and leading criminal anthropologist, an account of the trial compiled from contemporary newspapers, and a short epilogue describing Roddy's wretched end.


It's all a fake - or is it? We can't fail to notice that Burnet is himself a Macrae. It is the actuality question which hooks us to begin with. After all, there can't be much of a whodunit here. There are only nine houses in the crofting hamlet and Roddy was seen heading to Mackenzie's with the murder weapons and again, coming back half-an-hour later smothered in fresh blood. More to the point, Roddy has insisted, from that moment forward, that he alone did it. Is he mad? This is the only hope of his solicitor, who commissions the report from Thomson. But there is no sign of madness in Roddy's writing. True, some of his neighbours consider him to be an imbecile, but his schoolmaster wanted to put him forward for a scholarship.


Burnet ingeniously plants a couple of clues that suggest all might not be as it seems. They come together at the end but - another masterstroke - we don't get Roddy's reaction to them because defendants were not at that time allowed to give evidence in court.


Alongside all this we get a fascinating insight into the life of a mid-Victorian Highland crofter, a life that seems unchanged for thousands of years and which, to those trapped in it, must have seemed like it would never changed - renting their land at the whim of the laird and his factor, their only refuge their grim church. One of the great elements here is Burnet's portrait of utter, hopeless despair in Roddy's father John, a man in his forties looking twice his age, armoured in misery.


A tremendous book by an author of prodigious promise. There is an earlier novel, The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau, which won the Scottish Book Trust New Writer's Award in 2013, so I must get hold of that. And Burnet's next can't come soon enough for me.