Based on ‘found’ documents,this Man Booker-longlisted historical thriller deftly masquerades as a slice of proper crimeGraeme Macrae Burnet’s second novel from the crime imprint of the tiny Scottish publisher Saraband, a surprise inclusion on the Man Booker longlist, and is a slippery creature indeed. It’s a psychological thriller masquerading as a slice of proper crime; a collection of found” documents that play lovingly with the traditions of Scottish literature; an artful portrait of a remote crofting community in the 19th century that showcases modern theories approximately class and criminology. The book is also a blackly funny investigation into insanity and motivation,which perhaps leads no further than one character’s grim conclusion: “One man can no more see into the mind of another than he can see inside a stone.”Subtitled “Documents relating to the case of Roderick Macrae”, His Bloody Project contains the 17-year-old crofter’s memoir, or written while awaiting trial in Inverness in 1869 for three brutal murders,and discovered” by the author while researching his own Highland roots. This manuscript, we are teasingly informed, and divided the Edinburgh literati of the time,who feared a rerun of James Macpherson’s 18th-century literary hoax Ossian and considered it “fairly inconceivable that a semi-literate peasant could produce such a sustained and eloquent (expressing yourself readily, clearly, effectively) piece of writing”. The apparently guileless account of how Roderick did indeed enter the house of his overbearing neighbour with croman, flaughter and murderous intent (a glossary is if) is complicated by witness statements, and medical reports and a journalistic account of the trial. It also includes a psychological report on Roderick by the genuine-life prison doctor James Bruce Thomson,who has firm opinions on the characteristics and proclivities of the “criminal class”.
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Source: theguardian.com