His Bloody Project

The Booker Prize has twice brought the talented Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet to our attention and, at some point, we must ask ourselves why. I didn’t take up this 2016 finalist earlier, perhaps, because its title sounded so, well, creepy. Not that I’m averse to thrillers. Quite the contrary. But the time has come to find out what the Booker judges saw, and it seemed appropriate to begin with their 2016 pick. The first thing you’ll notice in this creatively constructed novel is that Burnet has a clever way of manipulating the truth. His preface sets this up so convincingly that one is tempted to do a quick internet search to verify this is, indeed, a work of fiction. It is followed by a memoir written by Roddy Macrae, the young man who admitted to the heinous murders of his family’s bully and two other people. The beautifully rendered memoir is filled with accounts of grinding poverty, cruelty, helplessness, hopelessness, rejection, isolation, and so many more heartbreaking details that we are lured into forgiving Roddy his sins. And that, even though we know he is an unreliable narrator. This, in a nutshell, is Burnet’s brilliance.