His Bloody Project's Graeme Macrae Burnet on new novel Case Study

Talking over Zoom from his home in Glasgow’s West End, the Kilmarnock-born author says there was “no downside” at all to the Booker nomination. “I feel quite fortunate in that it wasn’t my first novel. I think if it had been I’d be like: ‘This is easy.’ But I knew the reality for the vast majority of novelists and writers is that it’s very difficult to make a living. So when you are fortunate enough to have a spotlight shone on your book, and for it to be translated and published in other countries, it’s hard to see a downside … you need your work to be in people’s eye-line, whether that’s through being nominated for a prize or having it on the front table at Waterstone’s.”

His Bloody Project is about a triple murder committed by one Roddy Macrae in 1869 in the Highland village of Culduie, re-told by Macrae Burnet and a story supposedly uncovered by him while researching the life of his grandfather, who hailed from Applecross. Unlike many Booker-shortlisted novels, it was a hit with the buying public. By September 2016 it had sold twice as many copies as the eventual winner, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. A filmed adaptation is currently in development with Scottish-based Synchronicity Films, who are soon to begin adapting the work of another literary Graeme – Armstrong, author of The Young Team.

Booker nomination duly bagged, what Macrae Burnet did next was return not to Scotland or the 19th century but to St-Louis, a small French town on the Swiss border. It’s the setting for his debut novel, The Disappearance Of Adèle Bedeau, a noir-ish, sort-of-crime-thriller with a genre-subverting sting in the tail. In 2017 he published The Accident On The A35, an equally playful and noir-ish sequel. A third novel in the series is planned but ahead of that comes Case Study, his latest novel and a work at once different from His Bloody Project and oddly similar.

“What’s interesting to me looking back on them is that I find myself returning to certain common themes or tropes,” he says when I ask what links his works. “These are often about parental and offspring rivalry. To some extent I think there is [also] a pattern of characters behaving in-authentically.”

Remember that word.

Case Study opens with a preface in which a writer, styling himself GMB, describes how he became the recipient of a series of notebooks purporting to contain information about a subject of interest to him: a once notorious but now largely forgotten 1960s psychotherapist named Collins Braithwaite. GMB, we learn, first encountered Braithwaite’s work in Glasgow’s much-loved second-hand bookshop Voltaire & Rousseau, and was intrigued enough to write a blog-post about him. This was seen by a man calling himself Martin Grey, who offered to send him the notebooks which he claimed were written by his un-named female cousin. The notebooks tell how this woman sets out to investigate the events surrounding the suicide of her sister, a patient of Braithwaite’s, by presenting herself to him and pretending to be ‘a nut’.

From there Macrae Burnet spins out a story featuring the notebooks presented sequentially and interposed with his own biographical re-telling of Braithwaite’s life, itself peppered with quotations from Braithwaite’s own writings and comments from people – former lovers, friends and colleagues – who knew the enfant terrible in his pomp.

It’s high concept stuff and fans of Macrae Burnet’s work to date will be familiar with the approach by now. “There is a kind of play of me distancing myself as the author of the text by creating this intermediary author,” he admits. He is, he adds, “a sincere advocate of the death of the author,” a reference to Roland Barthes’s infamous 1967 essay in which the French philosopher rejects interpreting novels through discussion of who the author is or what they may or may not have meant by their work.

The seed which grew into the new novel came out of reading psychological case studies and case histories. “I became interested in the version of events you get written by the therapist and wondering: ‘How do these encounters seem from the other side of the room?’. So I sought out some of the accounts written by clients or patients rather than by therapists.”

He found a world of colourful characters and questionable practices where it wasn’t unusual for a patient to turn up to an appointment and find their therapist sitting naked. The perennially barefoot Collins Braithwaite likes to slump on the floor during his sessions with the un-named journal keeper.

The novel is set mostly in London and mostly in the mid-1960s, though at points it flits back a decade or so to the Oxford of the 1950s. It also features encounters with real-life figures such as Dirk Bogarde (Braithwaite meets him at a party and tells him he’s always acting) and Colin Wilson, the philosopher, novelist and occult expert best known for his 1956 work The Outsider. He and Braithwaite meet in a Soho pub and almost come to blows.

Another important real life figure in Case Study is RD Laing, the Glasgow-born psychiatrist who became a trailblazer in the treatment of mental illness. Laing’s cult 1960 book The Divided Self argues that psychosis is a result of the tension between a person’s private, authentic self and the ‘sane’ (therefore inauthentic) self they present to the outside world.

“I’ve owned my copy since I was a student but to be honest I’m not sure I read it then, or I only read part off it. But I came back to it in preparation for writing this book and it really blew my mind because it’s a book which I feel is about me,” says Macrae Burnet. “He was certainly an influence in that he does have this idea of a system of false selves that we present to the world, that we act in ways which we think the world is expecting us to act, and this can be problematic when these different selves come into conflict or replace what he would call ‘the true self’.”

A further theme is a product of the era in which it is set: the beginning of the end of the age of deference, and the assault on the Establishment by the so-called Angry Young Men, Grammar School educated high-achievers out to shake up the world of privilege and entitlement. Like RD Laing and Colin Wilson, Darlington born Collins Braithwaite is proudly and resolutely working class. Is Macrae Burnet asking us to draw comparisons with the present day, when a UK government stuffed with Old Etonians seems to suggest things have swung back in favour of the wealthy and entitled?

“I’m definitely not asking the reader to do that, partly because I try not to consciously think ‘What is the reader going to think?’,” he says (see Barthes, above). But he adds a caveat in the form of a question: “Have we progressed since then? It’s very reasonable to make a comparison.”

He isn’t keen on being called a trickster either. A headline on a newspaper review of The Accident On The A35 by critic and crime aficionado Mark Lawson uses the term. “I don’t like the idea,” he says. It’s easy to see how it could be applied, though: The Disappearance Of Adèle Bedeau purports to be an English translation by Graeme Macrae Burnet of a cult novel by one Raymond Brunet, and the author goes as far as to provide a biographical afterword.

“It’s probably a relatively unusual thing to do, to deny that you’re the author of your own first novel,” he says. “I never expected anybody to believe that, but when I went down to London and signed copies of the book in bookshops people actually thought it was a cult French novel. I hadn’t really contemplated the idea that this device would be thought to be genuine rather than fiction. I wasn’t trying to trick anyone.”

He has less of an issue with Lawson’s description of his oeuvre as “false true crime”, however.

“I don’t mind it. I sort of instinctively like it because it contains a contradiction. I’m not really too bothered by what people say or how people describe things and I quite like the idea that people aren’t sure what something is. I think it’s only really on the money for His Bloody Project, though.”

If we split the difference and call what Macrae Burnet does a love of masks and games, perhaps it all goes back to a visit he made as a teenager to watch The Merchant Of Venice at the Citizens Theatre. He was 14 at the time and had never seen a Shakespeare play.

“What I loved, and what I remember about this production, was that the actors came in and swept up wearing boiler suits with Citizens Theatre on the back. They came on and moved the furniture around. As a kid that sort of blew my mind because that’s not what I thought happened in theatre. It was supposed to be an illusion, and that broke the illusion.”

He mentions the Woody Allen film Purple Rose Of Cairo, in which the star of a fictional film of that name steps off the screen and into the real world of 1935, and Desperate Dan bumping his head on the frame of the panel in which he is confined. “Referencing the medium in which the character exists and this Brechtian idea of breaking out of the fourth wall in theatre, all this stuff has always appealed to me”.

After school he enrolled at Glasgow University to study English Literature. After graduating, he spent several years teaching English as a foreign language in Portugal, France and the Czech Republic. He knows French well enough to be able to read the work of Georges Simenon (“a huge influence … I learned a lot about writing prose from reading him”) though he still prefers to come at him in English.

Returning to Scotland he found work as a researcher on television documentaries. It taught him the value of sources other than Google and Wikipedia, primary sources such as you find in libraries and newspaper archives, Anything else?

“I probably learned about how to construct something which contains a proposition and leads you towards an end point,” he says. “But I try not to let that kind of thing enter my head when I’m writing a novel. I just don’t think like that, and I’m very suspicious of manuals and talk of narrative arc and such like. I put my hands over my ears when people start talking to me about that stuff because I think once you’ve opened the manual and seen the formula, you can’t unlearn it.”

We get stories instinctively, he thinks. We just do. “We all tell stories. When we go to the pub with our friends, we tell each other stories. A joke is a story. You don’t begin with a punchline.”

He began to write at university, short fiction initially though in the 1990s he did complete what he calls “a fairly conventional crime novel”. It came close to being published. “I’m quite happy it wasn’t. I would see all that as a process of learning the craft of writing, but that was a fairly long apprenticeship without publishing anything.” He was 46 when The Disappearance Of Adèle Bedeau was published. “It’s fair to say that was reasonably late.”

In 1999 he enrolled in St Andrews University’s School of International Relations where he took a course in International Security Studies under terrorism expert Paul Wilkinson. He was drawn there by his encounters with English language students from the Middle East and a growing interest in why people take up arms. St Andrews was, he says, “a great experience … a brilliant department and I was taught by some brilliant people.”

Not that he found too many fellow travellers. “There was quite a lot of students there who were sponsored by American universities, I think some of them explicitly by the CIA,” he says. “I was kind of unusual because I was more of a Leftie, Chomsky-ite whereas the tenor of a lot of it was on security issues. I don’t want to appear to be a supporter of terrorists – I’m not, of course – but I think my interest in it was somewhat different to a lot of the other students.”

Which begs the question: having co-opted the crime and history genres to the cause of literary fiction, does he have a spy novel in him?

“Going back to things that re-occur in my books, paranoia is one of them and the world of espionage is one which is replete with paranoia, so it’s quite attractive terrain for me,” he admits. “I’m not saying I’m going to write a spy novel, but I could be attracted to it … A spy is always someone who’s presenting a different face to the world and having a secret life.”

The ultimate divided self, in other words.

Case Study is published on October 7 (Saraband, £14.99)