This starts with the ‘real’ author ‘finding’ a ‘genuine’ ‘historical’ event, and so there I was, thinking ok, I’ve read Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, I’ve read Poor Things, I’m buckled up for a complicated, surreal book which plays with the reader’s ability and desire to distinguish between reality and madness and the supernatural. Now I’ve finished it, I think that was a bad choice by the author, to allow those parallels to be drawn. Makes the book feel rather bereft in comparison. There isn’t a sustained hint of a ghoulie: any whisper of otherworldliness feels like historical set dressing.

It’s a clean text, for all it is doing moral complication. There’s a perfect matching of events discussed in court and document, despite the lack of crossover between the two, in a way which feels carefully done to ensure the reader’s got all information. This clarity about the succession of events means any discontinuities feel signposted. This is boring and novelesque! What happened to the document conceit!

The characters and their relationships also feel simple, tropeish. Tough father, dead mother, local bully, girl who leads on. Okay? I can see why this would be a stressful environment to live in, but this is a story, so why not have some interesting complexities. As it is, it’s fairly dull to read about, and without the murders, it would genuinely be deeply pointless. There is a hint at some deep interpersonal cruelty which pushes thing further, with the sister, but it’s so thoroughly external to what we’re told, that it feels meaningless at best, and nasty and a tad misogynistic at worst. The treatment of women in this is weird, and not really dwelt on enough for me to know whether that weirdness and lack of dwelling is an attempt to represent a lack of representation, a silencing of female experience, or if it’s just supposed to be a part of life at the time, important to include for realism but not worth lingering on. That’s too little information for me to comfortably give it the benefit of the doubt.

There’s two references to a Gaelic speaker, but otherwise the issue of language goes completely unremarked upon, and outside a scattering of context-particular nouns, the whole thing’s in plain English. This is nuts. In a novel – a novel! full of words! – which does engage with the estrangement of Highlands from Lowland Scotland, of the inability of lower classes to be heard by those who deemed superior, it feels like such a loss to not engage with the languages which were a part of those divides. It’s also less interesting to read. I’m so bored of plain English. Language is an opportunity for challenge, and has so long been a battleground!