- Title: Benbecula
- Author: Graeme Macrae Burnet
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Biblioasis
- Pages: 174
Reading a novel by Graeme Macrae Burnet is unnerving because the experience always becomes physical. You slip eagerly into a Burnet book because it feels like a familiar garment – only to realize that it’s a (metafictional) straitjacket, sewn from what are alleged to be found diaries or true historical accounts or actual case studies, or even all three. The straitjacket gets tighter and tighter just as the main character, with whom the reader has become unexpectedly associated, is revealed to be not just an eccentric but a psychopath. Then, just as suddenly, the tension releases, and you’re free again. There’s a lesson about storytelling in there somewhere.
Graeme Macrae Burnet.Euan Anderson/Supplied
Burnet is already emerging as Scotland’s latest genius of propulsive psychological thriller writing, following in the famous footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson (and his imitators Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner et al.) Three of Burnet’s six novels – The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, The Accident on the A35 and A Case of Matricide – are interrelated quasi-detective stories semi-featuring Georges Gorski, a depressed and heavy-drinking French detective. (Quasi- and semi- because very little in a Burnet novel conforms to convention.) Burnet claims all three are translations of the work of a 1950s French writer named Raymond Brunet, who threw himself in front of a train.
Burnet’s latest, Benbecula, was released on Nov. 11. You might assume that a depressed and alcoholic Scottish crofter living with his murderous, masturbating brother in their thatched and unlit crofter’s hut on a remote, “flat and sodden” island in the rain-swept Outer Hebrides off the northwest coast of Scotland is not entertaining or even amusing material. You would be wrong.
Burnet has stated many times publicly that his main interest in writing novels is to crawl inside the head of a character and stay there, to see what life is like as lived by another. Once there, he simply describes what he finds; he never judges the character, no matter what they do. This makes for a doozy of a read.
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The narrator of Benbecula is Malcolm McPhee, brother to Angus McPhee, a real Scotsman, who in 1857 did, in fact, brutally cave in the heads of his mother (who refused to fetch him a bowl of porridge), father and aunt with a farm implement in their crofter’s hut. Burnet first stumbled across the case in the Scottish national archives 30 years ago. Angus was found not guilty by reason of insanity and spent the next 42 years in the Criminal Lunatic Department of Perth Prison.
The novel’s action takes place five years later, in 1862, by which time Malcolm is living, utterly alone, in the same crofter’s hovel (now known locally as the Murder House) in the shadow of his brother’s crime, ostracized by the community, drinking whisky like water, subsisting on potatoes and living entirely in his head – his skull-house, he calls it – as he remembers and re-remembers his family’s benighted stretch on Earth. The McPhees have come to nothing. “They had ceased to exist with no bearing on the world.”
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Malcolm seems not be a criminal like Angus, but he’s not exactly Villager of the Year, either. His only regular visitors are the local priest and a married woman from the parish who makes sure he takes a bath once a month – out of charity or flinty Scottish lust is unclear. It could be both. And of course there is Malcolm’s missing sister, Marion, who allegedly left the parish with their younger brother, John, after Angus’s crimes, but has anyone heard from her in Inverness, a mere 180 miles away? You have to read the book to find out how all that turns out. It’s only 170 pages.
This is not true crime, but fake true crime, as one critic dubbed it: The crime happened, but Malcolm’s thoughts and reactions are Burnet’s imagining. In the course of bringing Malcolm to life, Burnet deftly recreates the rural existence of a 19th-century Scottish crofter – a brutally hard, subsistence-level form of slavery spent farming a strip of rocky land for food, and cutting peat and collecting kelp for a pittance, all the while fenced in by the rules of the landowners (no dogs, a minimum number of days of physical labour a year and so on). Their huts were tiny, cold, dark, thatched stone caves heated only by badly vented fires.
Burnet has admitted that, when he first read about the lives of crofters (today romanticized to the point where you can rent a luxury crofter’s hut), he became angry: His own grandfather lived under the system, and the action in the book takes place before 1886, the first time reforms to crofting life were introduced.
The Presbyterian dourness that marks Scottish life is doubled by the pressure of living at the bottom rung of the class ladder. “It is not the custom in these parts to bemoan one’s lot in life,” Malcolm notes. “When asked how things are, one always replies that they are grand, you do not admit to suffering or want. “He continues: “You act as if there is nothing more a man could want in life than to spend his days dragging seaware from the shore and choking over the burning of it.”
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Burnet’s anger is invisible, but he infuses it into Malcolm and Angus, with horrifying results. “One cannot choose what thoughts one has,” Malcolm observes, quite rationally. (Scotland, after all, helped invent the scientific Enlightenment, and gave the world the Encyclopedia Britannica.) “But one can choose whether to act on them.” The more isolated Malcolm is, the more his mind becomes his only companion. “I have the feeling that my skull has become the house in which I dwell and that I am no longer a man with arms and legs and a torso, but am no more than a brain. A brain contained within a prison cell of bone.” Something has to blow.
But this is the weird thing about reading Burnet: The more compressed and oppressive and inescapable the lives of his characters become, the tighter his books are wrapped in seeming limitations, the freer you feel as a reader. This is a good feeling to have these days, when everyone seems to be telling everyone else what they can think and do and experience.
Everything Burnet does is aimed at convincing the reader that what they are reading is stone-cold genuine, real: You know it’s made up and only pretending, but the constriction within the construction makes the story all the more exciting when you finally get to rip off the rules and live the life of the dark creatures Burnet has invented. Or let me put it another way: The way out of the dark hell of your own mind is to imagine yourself into the minds of others. Graeme Macrae Burnet will do anything to help get you there.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Outer Hebrides are off the northeast coast of Scotland. They are off the northwest coast.