Despite their obsession with stories that “tell us something about who we are today”, the big publishing houses too often overlook works which do exactly that through crime, experimental writing or forms that are casually dismissed as “genre fiction”. Presented under the crime imprint of the small Scottish publishing house Saraband, His Bloody Project feels like both an underdog and an anomaly on this year’s Man Booker shortlist, in the best possible way. Meanwhile, the quiet intensity, tangled family roots and near-farcical parochialism of village life – in which a lingering glance at the wrong neighbour’s daughter or an unkempt garden can spell ostracism from the community – recall variously Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, the works of Knut Hamsun and, more obliquely, another recent Man Booker nominee, Jim Crace’s Harvest. In the rigid class divide between the landed gentry and the quietly stoic land workers, I was reminded of Robin Jenkins’s Scottish novel The Cone-Gatherers.
HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.Some trading takes place with the nearby hamlet of Aird-Dubh Roddy, however, deems them slovenly folk, whose men are “devoted to the unrestrained consumption of whisky, while their womenfolk are notoriously wanton”. With Roddy Macrae’s dour, devout and recently widowed father having narrowly avoided a watery grave in a boating disaster, fishing here is considered a doomed pursuit. This is crofting country in an era of Presbyterianism – humble, austere, repetitive – and Culduie is a character in its own right.Īlthough only 300 yards from the sea, the hamlet prefers to look inland, where the inhabitants graze sheep and cut peat from the purpling heathered hillside. Here, the deed is spelled out from page one: a triple murder in 1869, committed by the teenager Roderick Macrae in the isolated nine-house hamlet of Culduie, in the Scottish Highland county of Ross-shire. Where more formulaic authors might begin with a body and triangulate outwards, casting a narrative net that takes in motive and procedure on the way to redemption, Macrae Burnet favours something altogether more evolved. But don’t be misled: Graeme Macrae Burnet’s second published work, the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted His Bloody Project, is a novel about a crime rather than a crime novel. The remote rural corners of any country will always offer a literary backdrop for crimes whose motives are deep-rooted and implications far-reaching.
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