Mind Picker: His Bloody Project

I was conscious that the route we were walking mimicked that of R_____ M_____ as he had set out two weeks before on his bloody project. And I wondered if there had been some inadvertent truth in the crofter's remark about the difficulty of determining the contents of another man's mind. Naturally, if a man is in possession of his senses, one need merely ask him, and, assuming the truthfulness of his replies, accept the account of what he might have been thinking at such and such a moment. The problem begins when one is dealing with those who deal in the border-lands of lunacy, and who, by definition, do not have access to the contents of their own minds.

His Bloody Project is introduced by author Graeme Macrae Burnet as a (fictional) collection of found material regarding a gruesome triple murder – perpetrated in the 1860s by a Roderick John Macrae – that he happened upon while researching one of his ancestors. Comprised of police statements, Medical Examiner's reports, contemporaneous newspaper accounts of the ensuing sensational trial, pertinent excerpts from the memoir of a star witness (actual Criminal Anthropologist Dr. J Bruce Thomson, if not an actual memoir), and a jail cell account of the events as written by Roddy Macrae himself, it makes for interesting reading but I didn't find anything especially groundbreaking about this “found materials” format. Right from the start, Macrae admitted to killing Lachlan Mackenzie and “two others”, so this doesn't have the tension of a whodunit; but if the purpose is to discover whydunit, an unreliable narrator, conflicting evidence, and rampant ambiguity leaves the reader with no settled answer to this question. I did think that the format allowed for a fascinating immersion in the time and place (and especially as the various materials were written by people of disparate class and circumstance), but while the setting was thus strong, I found the characterisations weak; I never connected with young Roddy Macrae. What a curious selection for the 2016 Man Booker Prize longlist: I would probably have liked this book better if its inclusion on the list hadn't made me expect something deeper. Spoilerish to follow.

I am writing this at the behest of my advocate, Mr Andrew Sinclair, who since my incarceration here at Iverness has treated me with a degree of civility I in no way deserve. My life has been short and of little consequence, and I have no wish to absolve myself of responsibility for the deeds which I have lately committed. It is thus for no other reason than to repay my advocate's kindness towards me that I commit these words to paper.

So writes Roddy Macrae, but from the start, author Burnet records that there had been some controversy over the years as to whether or not the boy even penned this account; one newspaper at the time calling it, “quite inconceivable that a semi-literate peasant could produce such a sustained and eloquent piece of writing”. This isn't incidental to the overall effect of the book: it is implied that Macrae's lawyer may have written the account in order to support his Insanity defense, and as no one ever witnessed the boy in the act of writing, as it wasn't entered into evidence at the trial, and as Roddy himself was never questioned as to its contents, its truthfulness as an account of the crimes is never verified. (In the part that's excerpted from Thomson's memoir, there are a few hesitant exchanges between the doctor and Macrae, and if the boy didn't actually write his own account, then curiously, the few sullen responses recorded in this section are the only words straight from the protagonist's mouth in the whole book.) There is a nice tension set up by the knowledge that Macrae killed three people that day (and as only Lachlan Mackenzie is named as a victim in the initial police statements, the reader needs to wait until the end of Macrae's account to discover who the other two were), and as gruesome and matter-of-fact as the reporting of the actual murders is, the details don't quite mesh up with the reports from the Medical Examiner that follow. I found this nicely jarring and a proper setup for the second half of the book.

But to backtrack: Macrae's account of recent events in Culduie (a village of nine homes and fifty-five souls in the Ross-shire district of the Scottish Highlands), although only recording the everyday facts of his own life, paints a vivid picture of hardship and resilience among the underclasses. Living as subsistence farmers (and sharing the family hovel with livestock), when a rival is elected village Constable and begins a campaign of harassment against the Macraes, they have no higher authority to turn to: the Laird (from whom they have rented their meagre croft for generations) cannot be approached, his Factor delegates all local matters to the discretion of the Constables, and even the parish Vicar ascribes everything to Providence and refuses to address mundane injustice (what would you expect from an adherent to a form of Presbyterianism that could declare at a woman's funeral that she died in childbirth to atone for the sins of her family?) There was an inevitability to the worsening fortunes of the Macraes (and especially because we start with the fact of the murders), but still, there were some nice moments of empathising with the injustice of it all.

The section by Dr. J Bruce Thomson was mostly funny because he's such a pompous ass. Upon first explaining his theories of criminality to the attorney, he writes, “Mr Sinclair, cowed by the superiority of my knowledge and intellect, assumed a more deferential manner”. And stating why he wanted a private meeting with the boy's gaoler: “Those tasked with such menial labour tend to form an allegiance with the first educated man they encounter, in much the same way an orphaned lamb attaches itself to the first hand that feeds it”. Despite thinking so much of himself – and despite relying heavily on the now discredited theory of Criminal Anthropology – Thomson is also used to show the evolving attitudes towards mental illness (and especially due to his expertise on how an individual can be physically responsible for a crime without being mentally or morally responsible). Nothing from this section contradicts Macrae's account of events.

The trial section that follows – said to have been “compiled from contemporary newspaper coverage and the volume A Complete Report of the Trial of Roderick John Macrae published by William Kay of Edinburgh in October 1869” – does contain testimony from witnesses that slightly contradicts Macrae's written account, or elaborates incidents to his disadvantage; Macrae himself does not testify. And this doesn't feel like literary trickery: you simply read one account, and then another that doesn't quite jibe with it, and when Dr Thomson eventually testifies with his own theory of the crimes, you can only sit back with the gallery and wait to see if the jury can figure out where the truth lies. There's humour to be found in the newspapers' editorialising about this or that witness, and some incidental information about the social/political climate; so this section added nuance.

In the end, I liked His Bloody Project well enough as an interesting work of historical fiction; the setting was vivid and I will allow that the format was useful for providing various points-of-view. The plot was interesting; but whether or not Macrae's account was actually written by the boy, we know we don't have the whole story. I haven't marked any passages that delighted me with their turns of phrase or insight. Unfortunately, I never felt that I was really inside the boy's head, and as a result, I didn't make an emotional connection to him or his plight, and for me, that's a fatal flaw. Nothing about this book felt deeply meaningful or elevated it to the heights of art; I am confounded by the Booker inclusion.