Benbecula

After having spent a few years experimenting further with ‘false true crime’, and inhabiting the French detective Georges Gorski, Graeme Macrae Burnet has turned his attention towards his native Scotland with his new novel Benbecula, which is part of UK publisher Polygon’s Darkland Tales. Other instalments from this series include Jenni Fagan’s Hex (about the North Berwick witch trials) and Queen, Val McDermid’s own take on Macbeth’s Queen Macbeth.

Taking its name from the small island in the Outer Hebrides where Jacobite Flora McDonald spirited away Bonnie Prince Charlie to exile after the Battle of Culloden, Benbecula revisits another, considerably darker, chapter in Scottish history, when in July 1857 Angus MacPhee bludgeoned his parents and aunt to death. He was later committed to an asylum for the criminally insane for the remainder of his life. The echoes of this crime, and the lingering effect on the surviving family members, are at the heart of this novel. In a wonderfully haunting first-person narrative, Angus’s older brother Malcolm recounts the period prior to, and after, the murders.

As the novel progresses, Angus’s own decline intensifies until he snaps and commits the murders. But it is in the aftermath that Malcolm’s own bleak circumstances become more apparent. Ostracised for his relationship to the triple murderer, and with his two other siblings gone, life becomes much, much harder for Malcolm. His inexorable decline is as much about his own sense of self as it is about his tenuous position in the community.

One aspect of Macrae Burnet’s brilliance as a storyteller here is the brevity with which he’s homed in on the complexity of Malcolm as a character. Like Claire Keegan, he doesn’t waste words, and as a writer he places great trust in readers’ intelligence to see beyond the words and lines, and peer much deeper into the psyche.