Alias Grace

Margaret Atwood has been a prominent author this year, but it's for her back catalogue turned in to streaming series. Her best known novel, The Handmaid's Tale, has been hailed as prophecy and an Emmy-nominated series on Hulu (I read the book years ago and have watched two episodes of the show, which is terrific but very disturbing) and her 1996 novel, Alias Grace, has been turned into a Netflix show. I've watched a few episodes after finishing the novel.

The book itself is very good if a bit convoluted. But eventually it takes shape after some shifting narratives. Grace Marks, a young woman who emigrated to Canada from Ireland, has been arrested for murder. Her accomplice, Jim McDermott, was hanged, but her sentence was commuted to life in prison. She was initially in an asylum but then moved to a prison, and her good behavior has earned her the opportunity of doing needlework in the governor's mansion (many of the chapters are titled after types of quilts).

This is all true--Grace Marks was a celebrated murderess. "The reason they want to see me is that I am a celebrated murderess. Or that is what has been written down. When I first saw it I was surprised, because they say Celebrated Singer and Celebrated Poetess and Celebrated Spiritualist and Celebrated Actress, but what is there to celebrate about murder?"

Atwood creates a fictional psychiatrist, Dr. Simon Jordan, an American who has been enlisted by the local clergyman to write a report that might lead to Grace's pardon. The book is then set up as alternating between her story, as told to Jordan, and his own experiences. He becomes obsessed with Grace, and substitutes his feelings for her with a sordid affair with his landlady. Jordan is weak and ineffectual, and does not help Grace at all, though they form a certain kind of bond during his interviews.

Grace's story starts with passage to Canada from Ireland. Her mother dies aboard the ship. Her drunken, abusive father gets her a job as a maid, where she meets a young friend, Mary Whitney (she will later take Mary's name when she is on the lam). Mary dies from a botched abortion. After a few changes of employment she ends up working for a Mr. Kinnear, along with the head maid, Nancy Montgomery, and the ruffian McDermott. The events of the murder are clouded in mystery. Did Grace participate in them, strangling Nancy with her own kerchief? She can not remember the event.

Victorian pseudoscience is on display, as a one-time peddler turned hypnotist attempts to get to the bottom of things with Grace, but that brings about a surprise. Is Grace a liar, or a victim?

As with many of Atwood's books, Alias Grace is a look at the treatment of women, shoddy as it was. The knowledge of medicine and psychology is crude: "Respectable women are by nature sexually cold, without the perverse lusts and the neurasthenic longings that drive their degenerate sisters into prostitution; or so goes the scientific theory."

Jordan and Grace's fates are interesting handled. Of course Jordan was fictional, and Atwood gives him an ironic destiny, as he goes off to fight in the Civil War. The real Grace vanished into history, and I won't spoil what Atwood does with her, other than it is humane, more than she was treated by society.