Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Scottish author Graeme Macrae Burnet is probably best known for his Booker shortlisted novel His Bloody Project, a dark literary crime novel that centred around a series of murders in the Scottish Highlands in the late 1860s. His latest book, Benbecula, is in a similar vein – based on the true story of a triple murder on a remote Scottish island in the 1857. Benbecula is part of the Darkland Tales, a series of novels by some of the best Scottish authors that retell and reimagine stories from Scottish history and myth and that has included works by crime fiction authors like Val McDermid (Queen Macbeth) and Denise Mina (Rizzio).

There are no secrets in Benbecula. On its opening page narrator Malcolm MacPhee tells readers that this is the story of his brother Angus who “did to death my father, my mother and my aunt, all in the most brutal and purposeful fashion”. Malcolm lives on his own in the family cottage, his other sister and brother having moved away after the incidents that he relates. The tale then oscillates between Malcolm’s strange, solitary life where he is supported by some of the locals, and the story of the months leading up to his brother’s crime.

As with his other novels, Burnet does not just tell a story. He uses the narrative to give a fascinating picture of a particular time and place. The residents of the island of Benbecula, and the MacPhee family in particular live on the edge of extreme poverty. They earn money by harvesting kelp but it is tough work and they make little more than they need to survive. Attempts to find other work are fraught. So the family flounders when they find themselves having to manage the increasingly erratic Angus and keep him home despite the problems that he causes in town as they would have to pay to send him to an institution. Burnet rounds the novel out with a lengthy Afterword which provides historical sources, a description of the trial of Angus MacPhee, including the use of the very new insanity defence, and then information about MacPhee’s institutionalised life after that.

Benbecula does not have the meta-textual flourishes that distinguish Burnet’s more recent books Case Study and his George Gorski trilogy (the third of which, A Case of Matricide recently won the Ned Kelly Award for Best International Crime Fiction). But it has a distinct narrative voice which instantly engages and carries readers through some fairly dark events and gives readers a glimpse into the lives of marginalised Scots in the late Nineteenth Century.

Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet

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8.0/10