jaxmom28's Full Review: Margaret Atwood - Alias Grace
It is almost the same as being innocent.
Set in the mid-1800's, Alias Grace is Margaret Atwood's (author of The Handmaid's Tale) fictionalized account of one Grace Marks, celebrated young Canadian murderess, and of Dr. Simon Jordan, not-so-celebrated young American psychologist.
The Plot
Grace Marks' father was always a lout and a layabout. His inability to hold a job, and his continual insistence on impregnating his wife, caused the family to emigrate from Ireland to Canada when Grace was but a child. The passage was poor, and equal to tales most of us have heard regarding third-class holds on those pitiful Atlantic steamers (vomit and refuse covering the floor, cramped quarters, havens of disease). Grace's mother dies aboard ship, and thus to Grace falls the responsibility for the family.
When she is almost 13 years old, Grace's father forces her into service (maid service) for the princely sum of board plus $1.00 per month. She goes to the household of Mrs. Alderman Parkinson and there shares her sleeping room with a soon-to-be friend called Mary Whitney. Mary is older, all of 16, and serves as a sort of mentor to Grace, teaching her the ropes of maid service, and advising her of the pitfalls, from both the classes above and the classes below, of being a young, attractive servant girl. Mary counsels Grace to keep her skirts firmly down until a ring encircles her finger and a parson makes all official. This is advice Grace takes very much to heart.
Unfortunately, Mary has trouble practicing what she preaches and, after visiting a butcher who calls himself a doctor, dies, covered in blood and with eyes wide open, in bed next to Grace.
One should mention here that Grace's mother also died in bed next to her.
Grace leaves the Parkinson's and tries a succession of other households, putting off the advances of some of her employers, refusing the sheer drudgery some others expect of her, and eventually makes her way to the service of Mr. Thomas Kinnear, Esq. Kinnear is a bachelor. He has a housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, and a hired-man-cum-chauffeur named James McDermott. His house is much avoided by the proper folk in town. There is something not quite right with the situation, but Grace is blissfully unaware until it is too late.
Mr. Kinnear and Miss Montgomery turn up very, very dead one day. Grace and James McDermott turn up, not long after, in Toronto wearing the dead people's clothes. The police put two and two together and arrest the pair. There is a scandalous trial, filled with all kinds of salacious details, and McDermott is sentenced to death. Grace also receives a death sentence, but her's is commuted to life in prison.
It is in the penitentiary that she is introduced to Dr. Simon Jordan, a young doctor interested in the diseases of the mind and looking to make a name for himself. Jordan undertakes to discover whether Grace Marks is truly criminally insane, as most would have it, or if she has become a victim of circumstance, fear, and poor judgement. If he can come up with a definitive answer, his name, and his fortune, will be secured.
Style
The novel is told in two voices: Grace's first person accounts, and a third person narrative focusing on Dr. Jordan. This convention allows the reader to delve deeper into both of the main characters (Jordan and Grace) than if the novel maintained a single voice. Atwood's use of it here is quite effective, and never confusing. She manages the shift in points-of-view without being abrupt, and the third person chronicle of Dr. Jordan's time away from Grace is particularly absorbing.
Atwood's prose is absolutely stunning. I cannot do it justice with mere description, and so I give you an excerpt:
When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all.
Impressions
Alias Grace is a fictionalized account of an actual historical event. Atwood pieced together newspaper accounts, court documents, and anything else she could find, and then filled in the gaps with her own unique imagination. The story she tells is plausible, and sometimes (well, often) predictable. This is not a book for those looking for gospel truth, or for suspense.
Grace's actual guilt or innocence is, in fact, really only a secondary consideration of the novel. Atwood never answers the question definitively, and the reader is left to determine that answer for him- or herself.
The book, however, is not just plain historical fiction. It is a story of loneliness and the pain it causes, and the terrible things it can drive good people to do. Grace once remarks to Jordan, "I would never blame a human creature for feeling lonely." This is, perhaps, why she finds herself locked in a penitentiary for life, because she cannot discover within herself the ability, or even the desire, to hold accountable those who act out of the desperate loneliness with which she is all too familiar.
Though not particularly suspenseful or surprising, I do recommend this book to anyone interested historical fiction and/ or early psychology. The novel is lyrical, particularly when speaking with Grace's voice, and poignantly evocative of a time and place (physically and emotionally) in which very few would ever wish to be. Through some 460 pages, Atwood carries her readers on a journey through territory that is not unknown, but, with her sly wit and poetic phrasing, it is a ride worth taking - if for no other reason than the scenery.
In Alias Grace, bestselling author Margaret Atwood has written her most captivating, disturbing, and ultimately satisfying work since The Handmaid s T...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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