Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet review: 'elegant and eerie'
Although ostensibly a fictionalisation of a real-life triple murder on the titular island, Benbecula is really a book about how precarious the idea of the self is, writes Stuart Kelly
This is the sixth work in the “Darklands” series, which has been a remarkably and consistently successful venture, having already showcased Denise Mina, Jenni Fagan, Alan Warner, David Greig and Val McDermid. Graeme Macrae Burnet, longlisted and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is an obvious peer. Benbecula is an elegant, eerie volume, and though it superficially might seem almost an imitation of his most acclaimed work – His Bloody Project – it is on closer inspection more akin to his lightly fictionalised account of the “anti-psychiatrist” RD Laing in Case Study. It is a book about how precarious the idea of the self is.
Set in the middle of the 19th century, the narrator is one Malcolm MacPhee, the last of his family to be living on the titular island. He is one of four siblings: a younger brother and sister have left, and another brother, we learn, killed their parents and aunt. Theirs has been a life of strenuous labour and little remuneration, mostly collecting seaware and subsistence farming. The unsentimental depiction of their lives is similar to Carys Davies’ Clear, but while Davies has a sense of the mutable natural world, Macrae Burnet is more concerned with the shifting internal climate, what Malcom refers to as the “skullhouse”. “It ill behoves a man to be too much in the interior”, he says, “A man who is too much in the interior is no better than a prisoner or an inmate of an asylum”.
Perhaps the most impressive feature of the novella is the sense of simmering. The bare facts are not really in dispute, but the reasons and motives are deliberately opaque. Rather than any explicit cause, Macrae Burnet conjures an atmosphere of suppression. Angus, the murderous son, is disinhibited in a queasy way, unable to conceal certain sexual urges: Malcolm has the same urges but prides himself on the capacity of stifle them. There is a hint of something incestuous – never explicit, but undeniably there: strangely, when I wrote my non-fiction book The Minister and the Murderer about a case of matricide, there was the same unprovable but unshakeable aura of endogamy.
The scene where Angus confesses is an exceptionally fine piece of writing, because it gives a reason that cannot be a reason. His mother’s refusal to make him porridge is the spark, yet the pent-up explosives are kept hidden. What might have been bathetic becomes sinister, especially given the “degree zero” style: “She said that if I had wanted some porridge I should have had it when the others had it, that she was not about to get up and make porridge for me when it was not the time for making porridge and I said but there is surely still some porridge in the pot and she said there might be some porridge in the pot but I could not have it because the time for porridge was gone and she was not there to be at the beck and call of an idle good-for-nothing. An idle good-for-nothing she called me”. Given the amount of whisky drunk in the book, this style almost reflects cognitive impairment. “I have no time for preternatural ideas of ghouls or unchancy beings”, Malcolm tells us, at the same time admitting to delusional apparitions.
There is an element to Macrae Burnet’s work that might feasibly be called existential. Malcolm is wondering about his own cognition: “thoughts will not think themselves. There has to be someone to think them. What else is there for a brain to do? If a brain ceases to think thoughts it is no longer worthy of the name. It would be matter like any other matter, like a cowpat or a buttock”. The use of the singular there is startling. Later, this self-consciousness is even more forensically examined. On being asked about his state of mind, Malcolm is bemused: “I do not know what state my mind is in or even if it is in a state at all… A man cannot describe the state of his own mind, for in order to do so he would have to step out of his mind to observe it, and man cannot step outside of his own mind because the man is the mind and the mind is the man. They are not like the white and yolk of an egg”.
The novella is supplemented by a non-fictional appendix (not a metafictional conceit: I had to check since one source is a Rev. M’Rae) which shows the extent to which Macrae Burnet has given an interiority to the stark facts. It’s a minor point, but his assertion that parish ministers provided the data for the Statistical Account of Scotland “between 1790 and 1947” is not quite accurate: they were still doing so in the third iteration in 1992, and given that Benbecula is predominantly Catholic, the priest would be unlikely to contribute.
One other thing niggled me. Angus MacPhee is also the name of a noted “outsider artist” from nearby South Uist, who was also incarcerated in an asylum in Inverness, supposedly for “putting himself in the place of the beasts”. Coincidence? Or room for a sequel?
Benbecula, by Graeme Macrae Burnet, Polygon, £12
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