case study graeme macrae burnet analysis

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Swearing, rants, reviews, on every level, book review – case study by graeme macrae burnet.

I had to Google the Booker Prize shortlist that saw Graeme Macrae Burnet’s novel His Bloody Project competing for the prize. It was way back in 2016, which is crazy. It feels as though I only read that a couple of years ago. I definitely wanted Burnet to win but that’s mostly because it was the only one that I’d read. That doesn’t mean it didn’t deserve it. His Bloody Project was an absolute masterpiece in the way that it blended fact and fiction. I knew that this was a writer that I wanted to read in the future. So, I ordered a copy of his next book as soon as it was possible. I knew that it was going to be something big. But could it possibly be as good as his last book?

It takes a very accomplished author to successfully blend fact and fiction without it seeming gimmicky. In His Bloody Project , Graeme Macrae Burnet proved that he was the kind of author who could make it work. His latest novel takes that idea even further. Not only is the fictional tale being presented as fact but he weaves in real-world figures to back it up. Each historical reference has been carefully chosen to add credence to the non-fiction style the book adopts. This makes the reading experience a complex and engaging one. It is up to the reader to decide what is and isn’t real. It is for them to decide what is true and what isn’t. I can imagine that plenty of readers will turn to Google as soon as they’ve finished reading to find out if certain people exist or not. This is all down to the strength of his writing.

The narrative is presented as a non-fiction book delving into the history of a long-forgotten (and fictional) psychotherapist Arthur Collins Braithwaite. Braithwaite was a contemporary of people like R D Laing and was a very controversial figure. His theories were all over the place and his ego prevented him from taking advice from anyone. Burnet’s novel is split between a fictional biography of Braithwaite and a series of notebooks that he was sent. The journals were sent to him by a Mr Martin Grey and were written by his cousin, a former patient of Braithwaite. She first met with the therapist after her sister’s suicide because she believe that Braithwaite may have played a role in it. She decides to go undercover and invents an alter ego for herself. But what does she discover about the figure and what kind of picture does it pain when combined with Braithwaite’s own past?

The notebooks from the unnamed young woman are presented in full and, before we even get to the main body of the novel, the preface begins with an admission of inaccuracies. Certain places have been misnamed in the journals and the geography doesn’t make complete sense. That means we are already being conditioned to question everything that we read. Can we trust her as a narrator and believe what she is saying? The fact that her behaviour becomes more and more erratic over time only makes it harder to trust what we’re reading. At the same time, the biography that runs alongside it presents the image of a troubled mind. Is Braithwaite really the type of person who should be holding council over anyone’s mental health? In his youth, Burnet had an interest in reading psychiatric case studies and you can see that he is having a lot of fun turning that format on its head. Instead of getting the therapist’s insight into the patient, the tables are turned.

From the outset, our unnamed female narrator is presented as a prim and proper girl from a wealthy family. She seems to exhibit perfectly normal behaviour for a twenty-something girl of that time. However, as we continue reading her words, it becomes clear that there is something beneath the surface. Is she simply playing a role or is there something deeper going on? It initially seems as though the power balance has merely shifted from doctor to patient but we are quickly left wondering who is actually in control here. It’s a fascinating and engaging reading experience, which is exactly what Burnet wanted. He has always said that he enjoys presenting his fiction with a strong sense of reality and this is a great example of that working successfully. You not only want to believe this happened but find it difficult to remember it didn’t.

This is metafiction on a whole new level and offers a new kind of engagement. One in which a reader can become fully immersed in a fictional world. Yes, we’ve all been immersed in what we’ve read before but there’s always that barrier. We always know that the novel we’re reading isn’t real. Burnet adds so much detail and realism to his work that these characters could easily be real. You could be reading history. The lines between fact and fiction are blurred so extremely and so expertly. There are so many fictional layers in this novel that you start to question everything. Not only do we have the fictional journal writer and her fictional therapist but there’s the fictional version of Burnet writing the biography. I mean, can we even be sure that the real Graeme Macrae Burnet is real anymore?

What we can trust is that Case Study is another masterpiece. Unlike His Bloody Project , there is humour here that brings a slightly lighter tone to the proceedings. It feels more fun and free than his previous work. The novel is an interesting look back to the 1960s counterculture thanks to the people Braithwaite interacts with. Any reader willing to get on board with the concept will enjoy a rich reading experience. It won’t appeal to anyone looking for everything to be neatly wrapped up at the end or who needs an answer to everything. However, it could force you to question everything you think you know about the novel form and your overall sense of self. It’s an absolutely astounding novel and is unlike anything I’ve read before.

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Did an Unorthodox Therapist Drive a Woman to Suicide?

“Case Study,” by Graeme Macrae Burnet, is a novel of found documents detailing troubled lives and shifting identities.

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By Christian Lorentzen

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CASE STUDY, by Graeme Macrae Burnet

To get to Primrose Hill from central London, you take the Tube to Chalk Farm Station, exit to your right toward a cafe and an off-license, and climb a path to an overpass above train tracks. The path is called, rather unassumingly, Bridge Approach, and a five-minute walk leads to Primrose Hill. I happened to live in these parts for three years, and I crossed the overpass twice a day most days. Just to the south is the Pembroke Castle pub, where Liam Gallagher of Oasis was once arrested, in 1998. Another neighborhood tippler, Kingsley Amis, favored the Queen’s at the corner of St. George’s Terrace, according to his biographer Zachary Leader, who printed his monthly tab. From my balcony I could see the phone box where Sylvia Plath would desperately call Ted Hughes at his lover’s flat in her last days. It is a quiet neighborhood, but one dense with intrigue and peopled by famous, messy and tortured artistic personages.

The events of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s fourth novel, “Case Study,” are set off by a suicide in the 1960s by a young woman named Veronica, who jumps from the Bridge Approach overpass and is struck by the 4:45 train to High Barnet. (I am not sure that High Barnet trains, rather than Edgware-bound ones, run on this track, nor that the overpass itself, rather than just the path that approaches it, is called Bridge Approach, but these are the sorts of possible slight inaccuracies that Burnet and his not entirely reliable narrators relish.) An investigation into Veronica’s death and the man who might have been responsible for it — her therapist, Arthur Collins Braithwaite, whose office is on Primrose Hill — forms the substance of the narrative. Like Burnet’s previous novel, “ His Bloody Project ” (2016), “Case Study” was nominated for the Booker Prize and consists largely of purportedly found documents.

The would-be Miss Marple of Burnet’s loopy detective story is Veronica’s unnamed younger sister, who, under the alias Rebecca Smyth, becomes Braithwaite’s patient to find out if he drove Veronica to take her own life. Rebecca details her five sessions in notebooks that decades later end up in the hands of a writer named GMB, our frame narrator, who is researching Braithwaite for a potential biography. Now cast into obscurity, the (fictional) therapist was once a figure of note, appearing on BBC chat shows and publishing the books “Untherapy,” a best seller, and “Kill Your Self,” which Rebecca calls “a jumble of incomprehensible sentences, each having no discernible relationship to its neighbors.” Still, we are told by GMB, “Kill Your Self” “captured the zeitgeist,” acquired for its author a cult following from which he drew a lucrative pool of patients, and “if anything, the impenetrability of certain passages only served to confirm the author’s genius.”

“Case Study” consists of a preface, in which GMB explains how he received the notebooks (from Rebecca’s cousin, who noticed a blog post by GMB on Braithwaite); the five notebooks themselves, one of which includes a chapter clipped from “Untherapy” about a patient who is clearly Veronica; five biographical chapters about Braithwaite by GMB, inserted between the notebooks; and a postscript, in which GMB ventures south to pay a visit to the Pembroke Castle. The elegant nested structure is one of the novel’s chief appeals. So is the contrast between Rebecca’s narrative voice, characterized by what GMB calls “a certain kooky élan,” and the cool tone of GMB’s Life of Braithwaite. What emerges is a comedy of identities tried on and discarded. Given the number of suicides that mark the story, it’s a comedy with dark underpinnings.

Rebecca lives with her father, a retired engineer, and their housekeeper, and works as a receptionist for a talent agent. Her mother died when she was 15, falling off a cliff before her eyes, during a family holiday in Devon. Given that Rebecca is the only witness to the fall, and that she admits to fantasizing about pushing someone off the cliff the sentence before recounting her mother’s death, we can’t help suspecting that she might have done it herself. But we have no more reason to doubt it than the rest of her story, and that’s part of the fun: The whole tale might be a hoax.

Unlike Veronica, who was a doctoral student in mathematics at Cambridge, Rebecca is not very ambitious. She’s an erstwhile fiction writer, having given up on writing after the one story she published in Women’s Journal didn’t have editors banging down the door for more. She is a homebody, happy to tend to her father and not be a “Modern Independent Woman.” She attests to being a virgin, and so becoming Rebecca Smyth means becoming someone else: the sort of woman who puts on lipstick, attends glamorous parties and drinks gin with gentlemen at the Pembridge Castle (as she calls the Pembroke Castle). Since she is not really that sort of woman, drinking even a little gin causes her to vomit in the bathroom the first time she tries it.

Braithwaite is also someone who puts on new identities, but at the same time he’s a recognizable English type: the humble boy from northern England who goes down to Oxford after the war and reinvents himself as a kind of romantic rogue. “Case Study” has a lot in common with the novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Roberto Bolaño, in which invented characters pass through tumultuous episodes of literary history that never quite happened, though it seems as if they should have. Braithwaite brushes against real-life figures, engaging in hostile correspondence with the psychiatrist R.D. Laing and becoming a confidant of the actor Dirk Bogarde. After an overblown scandal consumes his therapeutic practice and sets him off on a bender, he winds up back at the home of his father (another suicide) in the North, where he writes his unpublished memoir, “My Self and Other Strangers.” It is the source, we are told, of GMB’s biographical reconstructions.

“Case Study” is a diverting novel, overflowing with clever plays on and inversions of tropes of English intellectual and social life during the postwar decades. As such, it is not exactly an excursion into undiscovered literary terrain. Reading Burnet’s doubly mediated metafiction of North London neurotics and decadents, I often longed to turn back to the shelf for the real thing: fictions by Doris Lessing, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Muriel Spark, Jenny Diski, Julian Barnes, Alan Hollinghurst, Zadie Smith or Rachel Cusk; biographies of Plath and Hughes; films of kitchen-sink realism starring Bogarde and Laurence Harvey, with scripts by Harold Pinter; or even the documentaries of Adam Curtis, in which Laing often makes a cameo. It’s a compliment to put “Case Study” in that company and no insult to say that Burnet must have done his homework to get there. I imagine he lives in a flat full of piles of yellowing copies of The Times Literary Supplement, every issue a catalog of obscurities from across time. Humble children from the provinces who want to reinvent themselves have to get the stuff of their daydreams from somewhere.

Christian Lorentzen’s work has appeared in The London Review of Books, Bookforum and Harper’s Magazine.

CASE STUDY | By Graeme Macrae Burnet | 278 pp. | Biblioasis | Paperback, $17.95

An earlier version of this review misstated R.D. Laing’s profession. He was a psychiatrist, not a psychologist.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected] . Learn more

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The Line Between the Original and the Imposter in “Case Study”

“Who is to say which is the original and which is the imposter?” queries Graeme Macrae Burnet in his 2022 Booker-Prize-nominated novel, Case Study . The question is applicable to a character in the novel, to documents reproduced within the novel and, most intriguing, to the author himself.

Burnet is the ultimate unreliable narrator, and Case Study serves as a worthy addition to his oeuvre; however, defining that oeuvre is a challenge.

His 2015 novel, His Bloody Project , brought his work to an international readership with its Booker-Prize shortlisting. Burnet researched His Bloody Project at the Highland Archive Centre in Inverness, Scotland; inspired by a prisoner’s 1869 memoir, Burnet presents articles, police and witness statements, post-mortem reports, and excerpts from a memoir by a man who interviewed Macrae (the prisoner’s patronym). Burnet invites readers to examine “discrepancies, contradictions and omissions” in the archival documents, but international readers depend exclusively on Burnet’s book to assemble an understanding of the crime.

His Bloody Project inserts itself into the tradition of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) and Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites (2013). Such novels explore questions of interpretation via events in the historical record: central characters are accused of violent crimes against higher-status individuals, whose stories are prioritized because of their socio-economic privilege. In contrast, Burnet credibly presents documentation—all of which he has invented—with enough nuance and detail to position His Bloody Project as historical true crime.

But before all of that, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s name appeared on the 2014 novel The Disappearance of Adèle Bardeau, as the translator. In the foreword, Burnet marvels that Raymond Brunet’s cult classic hasn’t previously been translated into English; it’s been “almost continuously” in print since 1982 in France, buoyed by the subsequent film’s success. In the afterword, Burnet examines the alignment between various events and characters in Raymond Brunet’s novel and specific biographical details and prominent figures in the French author’s life. Burnet notes that Raymond Brunet died troubled and alone, having struggled to accept the film—“It was not a fictional character he was watching on screen, but a projection of himself.”

Raymond Brunet’s mother apparently outlived him, and after her death, a litigation firm dispatched an envelope containing a manuscript titled The Accident on the A35 . Burnet’s foreword to this 2017 novel describes how amused and guilty the author’s solicitor felt, actually possessing the second manuscript after the author’s death, amidst rumors of its existence. Burnet’s afterword provides additional intersections between fact and fiction in Raymond Brunet’s second novel. “So the premise and central characters of the novel were clearly rooted in reality, but what of the narrative?” Burnet asks, before explaining how one of the novel’s plotlines is seemingly drawn from the life of the man who directed the film based on Raymond Brunet’s first novel.

In the first of these translations, Burnet’s supplementary material spirals around a quotation from Georges Simenon’s autobiographical novel Pedigree : “Everything is true while nothing is accurate.” In Burnet’s commentary on Raymond Brunet’s posthumously published work, he draws attention to this passage from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Words : “What I have just written is false. True. Neither true nor false.” It’s more important for all of this to be believable than for it to be true, and Burnet creates a framework in which readers can believe, using his “expertise” on an imagined novelist (Raymond Brunet) to increase readers’ trust in Burnet. Despite positioning this duology in reality, however, Raymond Brunet is a fictional author.

But what of the author’s responsibility? In His Bloody Project ’s “Historical Notes,” Burnet indicates “any inaccuracies, whether by design or error, are entirely my own responsibility”. In Case Study ’s acknowledgements, Burnet accepts responsibility for a portion of the work, but “any inaccuracies” from the excerpted notebooks are that author’s responsibility. As Burnet’s fictions increase in complexity, he appears to distance himself further from his creative work.

Risking It All in “The Mayor of Maxwell Street”

In Case Study , Burnet presents two additional authors, whose documents are made available to readers. Most compelling are the private notebooks of a woman who is preoccupied by a young woman’s suicide; she believes that she has recognised the dead woman in a psychotherapist’s published work, despite that author’s having concealed the woman’s true identity. The author of the notebooks presents evidence of the psychotherapist’s misconduct and excerpts his publications; this complex structure allows questions about selfhood and identity, confusion and delusion, to proliferate. 

Case Study is not a unique narrative; novels as diverse as Jesse Ball’s Silence Once Begun , Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke , and Kwon Yeo-Sun’s Lemon (translated by Janet Hong) require that readers construct their own understandings, based on incomplete or conflicting accounts, of tragic events.Graeme Macrae Burnet stands apart, however. He not only presents different iterations of narratives, but different versions of authorship. Like a character in Case Study , Burnet has “a flexible relationship with the truth.” In translation? Not one word he writes is true.

FICTION Case Study By Graeme Macrae Burnet Biblioasis Published on November 1, 2022

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