Real life meets fiction in our picks of the Literary novels out now: Benbecula by Graeme
Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Polygon £12, 152pp)
One day in 1857 in a fit of insanity, Angus McPhee murdered his crofter father, mother and aunt on the Hebridean island of Benbecula and was later incarcerated in an asylum for the criminally insane.
In a furtive, cagey novel reminiscent of Macrae’s Booker-shortlisted gem, His Bloody Project, the incident – which actually happened – is recounted here by Angus’s real-life brother Malcolm.
Yet where that earlier novel riffed on the idea of a literary hoax, this ploughs the alarming psychology of subsistence life, whereby incest and madness are almost logical by-products of impoverished hermetic communities, and where one’s perception of one’s own reality is as unstable as the relentless unforgiving weather.
In recounting one murder, Macrae subtly introduces the idea of another to produce a consummate slice of alternative true crime.
The Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung (Dialogue Books £14.99, 208pp)
Bora Chung is a rising star of South Korean literature: quirky, clever and adept at a Gen Z-pleasing hybrid literature style that mashes together horror, sci-fi and magic realism.
Yet those new to her work will wonder what the fuss is about on the basis of this underwhelming novel which comprises interlinked stories set inside a mysterious institute housing various haunted objects.
Told from the perspective of various employees, it’s a bit of a shaggy-dog story, with a daisy chain of enigmatic incidents (disorientating corridors, doors, staircases and tunnels; a strange prophetic sheep; a magic handkerchief) leading, well, nowhere, frankly.
Like a seemingly endless dream recounted by a bore, this silly little book becomes more mind-numbing the longer it goes on.
Jesus Christ Kinski by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury £18.99, 208pp)
I suspect readers will either love or hate this novel, but either way it makes most contemporary fiction look bloodless by comparison.
In 1971 the German actor Klaus Kinski – a frequent collaborator of the director Werner Herzog, who once described him as ‘one of the greatest actors of the century, but also a monster and a great pestilence’ – performed a one man show about Jesus Christ.
Part of the novel takes us inside Kinski’s semi-deranged mind during that performance, while another concerns the efforts of a writer, some years after Kinski’s death in 1991, to write a book about Kinski after becoming obsessed with footage of him performing on YouTube.
Kinski once said he would have been better than Hitler, certainly at delivering his speeches, and on the evidence of this novel you can well believe it.