His Baffling Project

His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I found this book somewhat baffling. I can only think that this was Graeme Macrae Burnet's intention, although in the acknowledgements he gives no hint of such an aim: "This is a novel," he writes, "and as such I have taken some liberties with historical fact and, at some points, as novelists do, made stuff up."

The protagonist, seventeen year old Roderick Macrae, in jail and writing a confessional memoir of the triple murder of which he stands accused, has the same surname as the author. Is he a relative, or is it just a pleasing coincidence, the trigger perhaps for Graeme Macrae Burnet to turn something he came across in nineteenth century Scottish legal archives into a fictional narrative? This question niggled at me as I read.

If 'His Bloody Project' is purely fictional, as its creator reassures us, then why does it go...nowhere? Maybe I wasn't in the mood - books can misfire if they land on a reading pile at the wrong time - but I just kept wishing something would HAPPEN. Roderick Macrae is accused of a heinous crime to which he confesses, in detail, both in interviews with his legal representative and in his prison memoir. His young life was fraught with hardship - a loveless family life and a bullying tyrant of a neighbour, whom he murders; but he loves the tyrant's daughter so why kill her too? There really is no need for spoiler alerts because all of this becomes apparent so quickly. The drive of the narrative, apart from the harrowing account of Roddy's actions as set down in the memoir, which is ghoulishly page-turning, comes from the question as to whether he can escape punishment for what he has done.

For this drive to be effective the reader has to want Roddy to be forgiven. However, too many aspects of the triple murder were simply unforgivable. His legal advocate goes to great trouble to unearth pioneering psychiatric theories emerging at the time, but in the end the basis of his legal appeal is that Roddy has written the memoir. This didn't wash with me. So what if the murderer could articulate, in written form, what he had done? Yes, Roddy was remarkably well-educated given his humble and suffering life, but that seemed to me a very weak argument on which to base a request for the forgiveness of his atrocious crimes. Ruthless people can be stunningly clever and coherent. Literacy, sadly is no indication of virtue. There were so many other much more persuasive and powerful arguments the advocate could have made.

But maybe all the things I am picking holes in were 'facts', and this highlights the chief problem for me with based-on-a-true-story fiction (or tv for that matter). The reader does not know what to trust as 'truth'. This means that, unless very carefully handled, there are limits to which one will be moved by a story. If that is exactly the sort of opacity that Graeme Macrae Burnet is aiming for, then, hooray. However, I am sure he had also hoped to write a satisfying novel and ultimately I didn't find it so. Too much was unexplored or unanswered. The ending fell flat. I knew I was meant to see Roddy Macrae as a deserving soul, more sinned against than sinning, but I just couldn't manage it.





View all my reviews