Benbecula: Darkland Tales

LoveReading Says

Part of Darklands Tales, an inventively-curated series of Scottish histories and myths reinvented by some of Scotland’s finest contemporary writers, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Benbecula presents an incisive, haunting account of the real-life MacPhee murders of 1857 when, in the words of Malcolm, its unforgettable narrator, “my brother Angus did to death my father, my mother and my aunt, all in the most brutal and purposeful fashion”. 

Benbecula is brooding and raw as Malcolm recounts the long lead-up to the murders, and shares raw detail on his present-day life, revealing the madness that comes of living on the edge of the edge. He’s a remote island on a remote island. A man in a mire of thoughts (“The only thing that distinguishes a brain from a buttock is the thinking of thoughts”) and excrement (“Have I become a beast that befouls itself and lies in its own shit? No wonder Mrs MacLeod makes me bathe”). 

As Malcolm moves through recounting his early life, growing up as the eldest of four siblings, he shares how Angus long had a “deranged” tendency, and was often called an imbecile: “As a boy, he could not keep his hands out of his breeches…in the end we became inured to Angus poking and frottering at himself”. 

Beyond being a story of murders that saw members of a family slaughtered by one of their own, Benbecula is also a gripping meditation on madness and identity, on what it is to know oneself, and to know anything at all. In Malcolm’s words, “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 a man cannot step outside his own mind because the man is the mind and mind is the man”. Psychological thrillers have rarely been so poetically dark and enthralling.

Joanne Owen

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