Steve’s Bookers: Graeme Macrae Burnet HIS BLOODY PROJECT
Wednesday, 10 Aug 2016, 21:23
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Thursday, 11 Aug 2016, 06:28
No-one who truly loved reading could dislike this book. It
bespeaks the writer in their most professional mode. Indeed I think this is a
better novel than it might on first blush seem because it is professional about
writing, and reading. This is possibly easier in Scotland than any other nation.
That its finer points might be missed is the fate of great books from Scotland
written in English – think only of James Hogg, to whom this novel owes a
national debt – more impressive than that fictionally manipulated by George
Osbourne in England.
What do I mean by the
professionalism of the writing – it is metafiction, fiction about fiction (again
attesting the Scottish tradition from Scott or before), writing about writing, and
reading about reading.
Here is a crucial paragraph:
…I told him I was only writing it because he
had asked me to do so and he was welcome to take away the pages whenever he
wished. He replied that he preferred to wait until I had finished and that it
was important for me to continue as if I was writing neither for him nor any
other audience.’ (p. 84)
This from a fictional account that manages the narrative of
a fictive event (the ‘bloody project’ named by the real alienist introduced into
the novels mix of history and something else. This account is to become the
fictive basis of other fictions, misrepresenting their original – an original,
of course that never itself existed (perhaps) and transcribed by a fictive
version (GMB) of the real author, Burnet, based on a fictive character with the same name as the author, preceded by a preface full of lies). We
are here in the world of Hogg's Confessions of A Justified Sinner and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus – both artists strongly
neglected in England but not in Scotland.
Fiction that even questions whether it can be read properly by
its audience, must succeed on lots of levels and this does. Not only in the
many brilliant comparisons of Scottish and English culture and their effects
(only in Scotland we are told would people realise the true oppression of the ‘crofter’)
but in its truth to geographical culture – Wester Ross rises before us with
Raasay and Skye in the background – AND its ability to exist as a good ‘thriller’
– a ‘page-turner’ (the book that people were surprised to see on the Booker (Waterstones,
for instance, stocked it mainly in their Scottish branches only, a
Waterstones bookseller tells me).
But, in being all these things, it holds its secrets close
to its chest. Thomson the real alienist – there's a brief biography in the Acknowledgements – is
represented as a good BUT SUBJECTIVE reader, despite his tendency to say he
sees only facts. In Burnet’s version he is a proto-Freud, reading the mutilation
of Flora as a symbol of a repressed wish. The only begetter / inspiration of
Roddy Macrae’s (the murderer’s) account has very mixed motives that look BOTH
to a nineteenth century amateur interest in Pinel and to the literary nature of
Roddy’s account. But even he doesn’t ‘get it’.
This novel stays with you because all readings it contains
of itself – even yours, whichever reader now holds it – can find food for many
interpretations of what makes a ‘bloody project’ in fiction – the need to
externalise, project, a world in which blood speaks. You will notice how pallor
and blood under the skin speak in this novel as well as in their outer manifestations
as a ‘coat’. I noticed twice that a ‘bloody’ project(ion) unites both murder
and murdered whom both 'take' an innocent from each other’s family – when Lachlan
has sex with Roddy’s sister on the family kitchen table:
I saw his member protruding from
his breeches, greatly engorged and rigid as a broom handle.
And when he himself presses himself up against Flora,
Lachlan’s daughter, to her disgust:
I felt the skin of Flora’s neck
against my lips and inhaled her smell. I felt a great coursing in my groin.
And I notice that because they may be what sparked Thomson’s
reading of Roddy’s crime – remembering that we are told that it was not
possible to refer to the account in the trial for legal reasons. And, of
course, Flora’s body – defiled in head and genitals is - as Jetta was -laid by
her man on a kitchen table. All quite horrible, of course!
This supports Thomson’s reading but misses out Jetta and
Roddy’s feelings about Lachlan’s sexual abuse and abandonment of Jetta, when
the latter is pregnant.
Yet Jetta forms part of hardly anybody’s conjecture in their
thinking about the meaning of either the event or Roddy’s account of it in the
novel. She is a spare part waiting for an ingenious reading - a tieing together of poltical and sexual oppression.
So – a meta-novel. Like so many of Scottish great forebears
(Waverley is one as well)!
As a novel using Gothic metaphors to speak of social
justice, I personally preferred Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (sorrowfully not even longlisted). But this is a
very good novel. Not my winner but great nevertheless.
Steve’s Bookers: Graeme Macrae Burnet HIS BLOODY PROJECT
No-one who truly loved reading could dislike this book. It bespeaks the writer in their most professional mode. Indeed I think this is a better novel than it might on first blush seem because it is professional about writing, and reading. This is possibly easier in Scotland than any other nation. That its finer points might be missed is the fate of great books from Scotland written in English – think only of James Hogg, to whom this novel owes a national debt – more impressive than that fictionally manipulated by George Osbourne in England.
What do I mean by the professionalism of the writing – it is metafiction, fiction about fiction (again attesting the Scottish tradition from Scott or before), writing about writing, and reading about reading.
Here is a crucial paragraph:
…I told him I was only writing it because he had asked me to do so and he was welcome to take away the pages whenever he wished. He replied that he preferred to wait until I had finished and that it was important for me to continue as if I was writing neither for him nor any other audience.’ (p. 84)
This from a fictional account that manages the narrative of a fictive event (the ‘bloody project’ named by the real alienist introduced into the novels mix of history and something else. This account is to become the fictive basis of other fictions, misrepresenting their original – an original, of course that never itself existed (perhaps) and transcribed by a fictive version (GMB) of the real author, Burnet, based on a fictive character with the same name as the author, preceded by a preface full of lies). We are here in the world of Hogg's Confessions of A Justified Sinner and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus – both artists strongly neglected in England but not in Scotland.
Fiction that even questions whether it can be read properly by its audience, must succeed on lots of levels and this does. Not only in the many brilliant comparisons of Scottish and English culture and their effects (only in Scotland we are told would people realise the true oppression of the ‘crofter’) but in its truth to geographical culture – Wester Ross rises before us with Raasay and Skye in the background – AND its ability to exist as a good ‘thriller’ – a ‘page-turner’ (the book that people were surprised to see on the Booker (Waterstones, for instance, stocked it mainly in their Scottish branches only, a Waterstones bookseller tells me).
But, in being all these things, it holds its secrets close to its chest. Thomson the real alienist – there's a brief biography in the Acknowledgements – is represented as a good BUT SUBJECTIVE reader, despite his tendency to say he sees only facts. In Burnet’s version he is a proto-Freud, reading the mutilation of Flora as a symbol of a repressed wish. The only begetter / inspiration of Roddy Macrae’s (the murderer’s) account has very mixed motives that look BOTH to a nineteenth century amateur interest in Pinel and to the literary nature of Roddy’s account. But even he doesn’t ‘get it’.
This novel stays with you because all readings it contains of itself – even yours, whichever reader now holds it – can find food for many interpretations of what makes a ‘bloody project’ in fiction – the need to externalise, project, a world in which blood speaks. You will notice how pallor and blood under the skin speak in this novel as well as in their outer manifestations as a ‘coat’. I noticed twice that a ‘bloody’ project(ion) unites both murder and murdered whom both 'take' an innocent from each other’s family – when Lachlan has sex with Roddy’s sister on the family kitchen table:
I saw his member protruding from his breeches, greatly engorged and rigid as a broom handle.
And when he himself presses himself up against Flora, Lachlan’s daughter, to her disgust:
I felt the skin of Flora’s neck against my lips and inhaled her smell. I felt a great coursing in my groin.
And I notice that because they may be what sparked Thomson’s reading of Roddy’s crime – remembering that we are told that it was not possible to refer to the account in the trial for legal reasons. And, of course, Flora’s body – defiled in head and genitals is - as Jetta was -laid by her man on a kitchen table. All quite horrible, of course!
This supports Thomson’s reading but misses out Jetta and Roddy’s feelings about Lachlan’s sexual abuse and abandonment of Jetta, when the latter is pregnant.
Yet Jetta forms part of hardly anybody’s conjecture in their thinking about the meaning of either the event or Roddy’s account of it in the novel. She is a spare part waiting for an ingenious reading - a tieing together of poltical and sexual oppression.
So – a meta-novel. Like so many of Scottish great forebears (Waverley is one as well)!
As a novel using Gothic metaphors to speak of social justice, I personally preferred Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (sorrowfully not even longlisted). But this is a very good novel. Not my winner but great nevertheless.
All the best
Steve