His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Excellent Scottish historical crime novel, shortlisted for the Booker in 2016.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Honestly, "literary crime fiction" can be a bit dull sometimes, can't it? All those chilly, brittle delineations of character and meditations on why. The writing may be absent the tiresome clunks often found in a commercial procedural, but also missing is the compulsive moreishness that means you've read a third of the book before you've even looked up from the page again, perplexed and perhaps worried that something so fucking grim is also so much fun. Not so here. This is a book I'd highly recommend to everyone on my GR friendslist who enjoys superbly-done genre writing. It also has greater depth and interest than much contemporary litfic with more overt pretension.

Among the great fascinations here are the character of seventeen year old Roderick himself and how he is developed - the sort of character whom in the hands of a less skilled author could appear clumsily created to appeal to the typical reader of books, somewhat more solitary and intelligent than those around him, with a few aspie-sounding traits. But he never evoked the heroines or heroes of those cheesy bestsellers about magical bookshops and the like, rather this felt like a completely authentic portrait of the sort of young person who the village schoolmaster wished would go to university, but who had to stay and work the family farm, the ways in which such a person's routine days may have been spent. (I daresay a few of you think of this type as being among your ancestors too.) His blend of thoughts seemed so well chosen it was sometimes hard to believe he hadn't been a real person - the tendencies shared with the men of the Scottish Enlightenment and their intellectual descendants, just communicated more plainly, and others with obvious roots in the remote crofting hamlet (c.f. the miller in the microhistory [book:The Cheese and the Worms|71148]) and his mixture of bolshiness and spartanness that is IMO utterly characteristic of a certain kind of bright Scot. The presentation of multiple accounts of the 'case' leads to a curious co-existence of sympathy and more detached views of Roderick. (The presentation is immersive enough that a few people have tagged the novel as 'true crime' and I felt I should do a search to be completely sure it was fiction.)

This is also a story about religion and class.

The story is set a short while after the major phases of the Highland Clearances, but the same powerlessness in the face of of landowners still exists, and still educated characters from further south just don't get it. His Bloody Project is the type of historical novel that leans far more towards accuracy than towards wish-fulfilment for modern readers, but it has modern concerns about the voices of the voiceless, about well-meaning do-gooders, about snobs and their theories on the degenerate poor. It simultaneously makes one relieved that better checks and balances exist now, but concerned about their erosion. And one may feel we know better than the C19th "criminal anthropologist" in certain of his ideas - but how different are some of our current ones, and can we really know they are correct?

I'd forgotten just how utterly pervasive its puritan fatalism of Scots Presbyterianism can be (a tendency which IMO seeps into the Scots mindset even among the non-religious: where does stoicism and acceptance become passivity, exactly?) - and it's possible I've read an equally good evocation of the way this fatalism held people back in its mind forg'd manacles, but if I ever have I can't remember what it was. This book communicates it so very well to the modern reader without any sledgehammering, using characters who are both within and outwith that frame of mind. It's the great unspoken among the educated characters: have they not spotted its role because it's as pervasive as air, or because it's not yet the done thing to question it? Should I even be blaming it on organised Christianity when its roots in more ancient superstitions are also seen here? It may have been a part of the place for centuries or even millenia before John Knox, no doubt a communal coping tactic in a harsh landscape. It may be ancient, but in Roddy there's something modernist and existentialist about it too.
That which cannot be talked about by the characters is still barely talked about in the book, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions. [Major spoiler follows.] It is my theory that Roderick wrote his account in good faith, and that the suppression of sexual topics in his environment, especially his own family, was such that he was unable to verbalise or even think coherently about them, betraying them only through non-verbal discomfort. The contrast between his memoir and the PM report was obvious and I was waiting to see if or how this would be dealt with overtly later in the novel. This type of suppression wouldn't be widely acknowledged until Freud, and so it seems fitting to be frustrated by the mixture of insight and its absence from the C19th experts. I consider that religion, plus some kind of idea of vengeance for Broad's treatment of Jetta and her fate, underlay Flora's injuries - but, being deeply conscious of the following as a historically situated viewpoint just as Thomson's was, that it is possible the lad had some sort of propensity to sexual misdemeanours anyway, and it's impossible to tell whether that would have still existed in him had he lived in a time and place with very different attitudes: whether it's all about the suppression as a trigger to or creator of his propensities, or whether they would always have been there full stop. Both of which likewise relate to the suspicion that hangs around the father sleeping in the same room as Jetta after Una's death. Regardless of these details, Roderick was still a dangerous individual. It was interesting that the way he killed the murder victims so closely resembled the way he killed the sheep; a modern liberal interpretation - which I'm sure would not be looked kindly upon those in the meat trade - would be that the experience of killing a fairly large mammal, and the fact that this was a normal thing to do in his world, had removed some of the empathic barriers to killing a person, leaving only fear and self-interest as the main inhibitions.

This is one of the best crime novels I've read (a surprising proportion of those are Scottish), notable for its intricate attention to larger themes and historical setting, alongside being a thumping good read - deserving of the greater audience the Booker longlisting has brought it, and all the more enjoyable in that context because of the way it zips along and focuses on people somewhere far removed from the typical Booker settings of London/New York/Mumbai.

(read & reviewed August 2016; the review on Goodreads.)