...a blackly funny investigation into madness and motivation ... The descriptions of the crofting community, scratching a living from ungenerous soil, at the mercy of the laird, the church and the weather, are fascinatingly done ... The book’s pretence at veracity, as well as being a literary jeux d’esprit, brings an extraordinary historical period into focus, while the multiple unreliable perspectives are designed to keep the audience wondering, throughout the novel and beyond. This is a fiendishly readable tale that richly deserves the wider attention the Booker has brought it.
Although he clearly draws on a Scottish literary tradition, there are other Celtic influences at work too: Joyce’s fragmentary assembly of narrative and that blackly comic strain characteristic of so many Irish writers. But this is not just a tricksy literary experiment — Burnet is a writer of great skill and authority. The central notion — a thuggish bully receiving bloody justice — is satisfyingly freighted with acute historical detail ... Whatever the genre, few readers will be able to put down His Bloody Project as it speeds towards a surprising (and ultimately puzzling) conclusion.
In offering us various pieces of the puzzle without any neat, prefab conclusions, Burnet turns his readers into detectives ... The seduction of many crime stories is that they offer all the answers we don’t get in real life. His Bloody Project reminds us that there are other pleasures to be drawn from a superb novel that revolves around the act of murder.
This trick of framing a novel as a supposed tale of a discovered manuscript is as old as the novel form itself, and the author’s sensitivity to literary forebears helps boost his book out of the realm of genre. His Bloody Project has the lineaments of the crime thriller but some of the sociology of a Thomas Hardy novel ... sane or mad, good or evil, honest or unreliable, this unfortunate young man, thanks to Mr. Burnet’s literary skill, makes a profound connection with the reader.
Graeme Macrae Burnet makes such masterly use of the narrative form that the horrifying tale he tells seems plucked straight out of Scotland’s sanguinary historical archives.
...[a] gripping, unnerving novel ... The novel — which also includes statements given to police, medical reports and trial transcripts — is so believable that it reads like a historical account, not fiction. The footnoted preface from the author, Graeme Macrae Burnet, claiming he ran across this bloody story while researching the life of his grandfather, serves to argue for the book's authenticity. But it's not fact, it's fiction — riveting, sometimes even grotesque, fiction. So the book's lackluster conclusion seems all the more disappointing. In the end, Roddy remains a mystery, his motivations and mental health uncertain.
