Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (2015): A Slippery Neo-Historical Novel
Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project is deliberately baffling for the first-time reader, playfully blending as it does reality and fiction. Subtitled ‘Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae’, a seventeen-year-old Highlands crofter who, in 1869, murdered three people, it plays on the...
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| Udgivet i: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprog: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2025
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| Online adgang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project is deliberately baffling for the first-time reader, playfully blending as it does reality and fiction. Subtitled ‘Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae’, a seventeen-year-old Highlands crofter who, in 1869, murdered three people, it plays on the similarity of the family name (Macrae) of the real author and of the (fictional) main character. It is also characterised as a novel edited and introduced by Graeme Macrae Burnet, who is thus not credited as having authored the text but only as having collected the various documents. The preface and the contents of this fragmented text continue with the literary jeux d’esprit and make His Bloody Project resolutely postmodern in its presentation. However, the use of scrupulous verisimilitude, a technique of the traditional historical novel, in terms of setting, language, description of the feudal conditions in the 19th-century Highlands of Scotland etc., also sets it apart from postmodern literary works. It can thus be considered a neo-historical novel, a new subgenre of contemporary historical fiction. I shall first examine in detail the claims made by the supposed editor of the novel and the way in which this collection of allegedly found documents plays with a long literary tradition as well as a more recent neo-Victorian literary trend; then how, without any hint of nostalgia, it engages in a quasi-sociological approach inspired by the French philosopher Michel Foucault with the Scottish mid-Victorian past it depicts for 21st-century readers and leaves them wondering about the unattainability of truth. |
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