His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae by Graeme Macrae Burnet
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hell in the Highlands

According to the Borges-like found-documents of His Bloody Project, rural Scotland in the 19th century was a society of serfs as oppressed as those of contemporary Russia or India. The life of the common man, from the provision of most basic physical necessity to the enforcement of law, was determined by the interests of the laird, and his administrative henchmen. The estate over which they ruled was the size of a small country and included every inch of ground, every hovel and wall, every resource of any value whatsoever, even the sea weed growing on the rocks.

The sociology of Burnet's estate-of-interest is more or less that of a war-time prison camp. The inmates spend much of their time trying to avoid or outwit their guards. The guards themselves, but not the laird who spends limited time on the premises, live the same bleak existence as their charges, with the frisson that comes from unchecked sadistic torture. A divine rationale for this suffering is provided by the local parson of the Church of Scotland: the horrible life is merely a just consequence of the utter depravity of all human beings. An extreme fatalism, which drains even the hope of escape pervades the book.

But there are limits, even to the superstitious subservience of those accustomed to expect nothing from life. Is it any wonder that, next to the Jews, the Scots are the most dispersed people on the planet? Or that the evolutionary crap-shoot might occasionally produce an intelligent but emotionally immature misfit who disrupts the equilibrium of this appalling social drama? The only mystery in His Bloody Project is whether or not its protagonist will be condemned or rewarded for his self-confessed slaughter of a clan of some very bad folk.

Interestingly the hamlet of Culduie in Wester Ross, the site of the book's important action, is a real place. Even more, it is apparently exactly the same in terms of its human habitation and its remoteness as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. Burnet provides an introductory map of the place which corresponds house for house and wall for wall with those on Google Earth today. For that and the frequent necessity to look up archaic Gaelic vocabulary, it's probably best to read His Bloody Project on your iPad.

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