Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet

A Review by Ian Stephen

Case Study
Graeme Macrae Burnet
Saraband (2021 hardback, 2022
paperback £9.99)
Longlisted for The Booker Prize, 2022

Last year I gave The Brothers Karamazov another go, in a recent translation. I got past the mists of names (each character has several depending on degrees of familiarity) and became engrossed in the complexities of minds and motivations. This proved good training for approaching Case Study. GMB introduces the big lie. That narrator carries the same initials as the guy who ‘translated’ the crime novels of one Raymond Brunet in Burnett’s two detective novels but he also signs himself to some of the papers which comprise His Bloody Project. He was already researching a maverick psychiatrist who makes R D Laing seem a pillar of the establishment, says he, when a person named Grey, though not for real, makes an offer ‘too apposite to resist’. ‘Grey’ has possession of a series of notebooks filled by his ‘cousin’ (who uses the word ‘inapposite’) all pertaining to the case studies of the infamous sort-of- therapist, Braithwaite.

Wait a minute though, it’s not that simple. The cousin has read thinly disguised case studies by the man himself and one, quoted in detail refers to ‘Dorothy’ who is definitely her sister, though she’s ‘really’ called Veronica. She is the one who took her own life whilst undergoing therapy in a run-down office on Ainger Road. (That’s reached from Chalk Farm Station. The geography and transport does work for real, up to a point. I did check. Of course Laing did exist though Braithwaite did not). The cousin of the person who isn’t really called Grey builds her own persona of Rebecca Smyth and we are indeed in the terrain of distorted mirrors and fade- out music, from Daphne de Maurier via Alfred Hitchcock. Case Study explores the character of both patient and psychiatrist by alternating Rebecca’s notebooks with GMB’s biographical study of Braithwaite.

As a reader you thus know you are a participant in a game right from page one. If you’ve read His Bloody Project you know not to take accounts at face value. If you’ve read either or both Burnett’s two crime novels, in homage to Simenon and set near Strasbourg, you are fully aware that the layers of allusion to previous works of literature are part of the deal. If all that sounds like a waste of time, you could say the same for any game which operates within a set of artificial constructs, say chess or bridge. What is really weird but brilliant is Burnett’s gift for engaging you despite drawing attention to the author’s devices. The voice which comes out from the notebooks does grab you with its individual mannerisms. Period detail and moments of intense clear focus, out from all these screens of smoke, build characters operating in their own times and places.

It seems to me that all Burnett’s constructs to date, whether in the ‘crime’ or ‘literary’ genres, are consistent in their interest in darting deep into human motivation. The potential cliche of a relationship between the man who has killed and the one who investigates is used to advantage, simply because the writer portrays the human workings so accurately. As in Dostoyevsky there is high drama and violence but also an unrelenting need to stay within the minds of the characters. Burnett’s books seem to me like film-scripts where your own imagination has to build on the hints, allusions, actual details, to see more of what’s in shadow. It’s worth remembering that His Bloody Project came out first on Saraband’s ‘Contraband’ crime label. I think this is very different from the way William McIllvaney seemed to find a different tone, even style for his more clipped detective story of Laidlaw after his bold but maybe more effusive working-class hero story of Docherty. I remember a fellow student saying he reckoned McIllvaney should write another literary novel but in the style of the detective one. Maybe that’s partly why Graeme Macrae Burnett’s books have crossed that seeming divide but also made the crossing to so many languages.

The character of Braithwaite suggests both comparison and contrast with J David Simon’s complex character of the writer in An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful. He is an enemy of the people of the United States and a hero of Japan. It is the disparity between the public word and the private harms, not always revealed, which produce dramatic tension in Simon. Braithwaite revels in public controversy.

Maybe His Bloody Project is essentially a tragedy but Case Study has a knowing grasp of the tragi-comic. There’s an argument that this time it’s just that bit too smart. Each reader, or player, has to decide that for themselves. One thing’s for sure. There’s a lot of what’s human in Burnett’s constructions.