I actually read this book back in September and have had ‘write book blog post’ on my to do list every day since then for this and two other books, but I finally have some time while home for Christmas and I’m getting things done before the New Year, dammit. So let’s see if I remember what I thought about this book.
We chose this book for our book club, and I was really excited about it because I had read an article about it back when it first came out and loved the concept behind it. It’s a novel that’s told as a true crime book about a gruesome murder in mid-19th century Scotland, with the texts of the novel being the journal account of the crime as written by the murderer in jail, various newspaper accounts of the trial, the writings of an advocate and a researcher on poor peoples’ propensity to commit crimes and it being an indication of their inherently base nature, and autopsy reports of the victims. There’s never any doubt in the novel as to whether Roddie Macrae committed the murders, but the trial revolves around his mental state at the time, and the novel itself is more concerned with why he murdered them, and what it says about the lives of poor villagers in that era.
I really liked a lot of aspects of the novel; the various ‘primary sources’ were all well-written and distinctive and really hammered home how biased all points of view are, no matter how ‘truthful’ they may claim to be, and the way a reader’s opinion of the murders can change with each additional source is really compelling. I felt for Roddie and how he was essentially pushed into believing that murder was his best option in life, because so much was so unfair to him, and yet only one of the three victims could in any way be thought to deserve to die, and various inconsistencies among the accounts of what happened make it (intentionally) hard to fully believe his version. Mostly the book made me mad at the way that the poor in general but specifically poor women and children were treated by men and rich people and rich men most of all. The life of a male laborer or farmer in that era was pretty terrible by modern standards, but I found it hard to fully sympathize with Roddie or any of the men, mostly because I wanted to murder all of them on behalf of the women in their lives. Which either means that the book was completely successful in the way the author intended, or that I can’t read fiction without that as a lens these days. I wanted better for Roddie, but I also desperately wanted better of Roddie. That shouldn’t be that strange to desire of a murderer, but for me it was less about the fact that he killed people (or at least one of the people) and more because of how and why he killed the other two.
Grade: B
We chose this book for our book club, and I was really excited about it because I had read an article about it back when it first came out and loved the concept behind it. It’s a novel that’s told as a true crime book about a gruesome murder in mid-19th century Scotland, with the texts of the novel being the journal account of the crime as written by the murderer in jail, various newspaper accounts of the trial, the writings of an advocate and a researcher on poor peoples’ propensity to commit crimes and it being an indication of their inherently base nature, and autopsy reports of the victims. There’s never any doubt in the novel as to whether Roddie Macrae committed the murders, but the trial revolves around his mental state at the time, and the novel itself is more concerned with why he murdered them, and what it says about the lives of poor villagers in that era.
I really liked a lot of aspects of the novel; the various ‘primary sources’ were all well-written and distinctive and really hammered home how biased all points of view are, no matter how ‘truthful’ they may claim to be, and the way a reader’s opinion of the murders can change with each additional source is really compelling. I felt for Roddie and how he was essentially pushed into believing that murder was his best option in life, because so much was so unfair to him, and yet only one of the three victims could in any way be thought to deserve to die, and various inconsistencies among the accounts of what happened make it (intentionally) hard to fully believe his version. Mostly the book made me mad at the way that the poor in general but specifically poor women and children were treated by men and rich people and rich men most of all. The life of a male laborer or farmer in that era was pretty terrible by modern standards, but I found it hard to fully sympathize with Roddie or any of the men, mostly because I wanted to murder all of them on behalf of the women in their lives. Which either means that the book was completely successful in the way the author intended, or that I can’t read fiction without that as a lens these days. I wanted better for Roddie, but I also desperately wanted better of Roddie. That shouldn’t be that strange to desire of a murderer, but for me it was less about the fact that he killed people (or at least one of the people) and more because of how and why he killed the other two.
Grade: B
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