5/27/2023 0 Comments His bloody project review![]() ![]() Macrae slew Mackenzie, the culprit states in a freely given declaration, “in repayment for the suffering he had caused to my father and to my family. 10, 1869, Roderick John Macrae, armed with a flaughter (a spade with a pointed blade) and a croman (a hand tool like a pick-axe), did enter the home of 38-year-old Lachlan Mackenzie, the area constable, with the intention of killing him and there did so, after first having murdered the constable’s 15-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son. ![]() ![]() Here are the blood-soaked facts of the case: In the village of Culduie in Ross-shire, on the morning of Aug. Burnet, a Glasgow author, does all of that and more in this page-turning period account of pathos and violence in 19th-century Scotland, a 2016 Man Booker Prize finalist. Is 17-year-old Roderick Macrae-the 19th-century Scottish farm lad whose first-person testament forms half of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s powerful, absorbing novel “His Bloody Project”-an unreliable narrator? Fiction authors from Henry James to Vladimir Nabokov to Gillian Flynn have used this device to induce ambiguity, heighten suspense and fold an alternative story between the lines of a printed text. This assured and ingenious novel, based on a sensational and dramatic trial at Inverness in 1869, is a deeply imagined tale of persecution, tragedy, revenge and courtroom drama noir historical fiction at its best. ![]()
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