DID SHE? AND DOES IT REALLY MATTER? (Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood)

Member Name: MagdaDH

Product:	Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood
Date:	17/07/04 (1896 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: insight into XIX century mentality, the way story is told, mystery

Disadvantages: demanding read, can be slow, 'cold' read

Grace Marks is a murderess. She is an ex-servant girl; in prison for having killed - or taking part in a murder of her employer and his housekeeper and mistress at the age of 16 . Her alleged partner in crime was hanged for his deeds but as opinions about her were widely divided she was spared the gallows and sentenced to life imprisonment. The next 30 years of Grace's life are spent in prisons and asylums although when we meet her, Grace claims having no memory of the murders. Dr Simon Jordan, a practitioner of just-being-born clinical psychology is employed by people who are trying to grant her pardon to prove her innocence.

Her remarkable story unravels before our eyes, being told by numerous voices including herself, Dr Jordan, his letters, press-cuttings, other letters and media relations of the time. Grace is a true character and the story of her alleged crime and the trial is real; but all that surrounds the raw facts of the murder, the trial and her subsequent imprisonment and release is Atwood's fiction. And mightily compelling fiction it is, using different voices, different styles and other devices to create the illusion of a collection of facts and reference materials interspersed with the internal monologue of the main character which constitutes the main storytelling device.

We learn the most about Grace from herself. She tells her own life story, the story she is telling ? but not really telling ? to Dr Jordan; from the childhood in poverty of Ireland through the crossing to Canada after her mother's death to her employment as a servant in several households in Canada and her growing up there to the last one where her fate is decided during this fateful day of murder.

There are more than two levels in this book; but two were important for me. One level is psychological and it deals with Grace's life and family history, her experiences, the trauma she undergoes as a teenage servant girl and the issue of madne
ss in general. This level provides what is presented to readers as the solution. I will not give it away as the novel is partially ? unbelievably for this kind of book ? kept going by suspense. This psychological aspect is fascinating enough, but not exceptional.

The other layer of the book and the one I found the most remarkable was in the captivating evocation of the XIXth century mindset; and we have the opportunity to explore this mindset mainly through two characters: Grace Marks herself again and Dr Jordan. The themes that are touched upon are numerous, but the two that I found most compelling and that stayed with me long, long after reading the book were the attitudes to sex and gender and the attitudes to social class.

In fact the attitudes of men to women and what the women think of themselves somehow mirror the attitudes of the middle/wealthier classes to the servants and the poor. The gulf between those groups is like a gulf between two different species; the gulf is uncrossable; the difference is due to heredity; it is REAL; and even the poor and the women themselves believe that.

Other themes that are noticeable are madness and insanity and their changing societal notions; mental institutions and their reform; prisons and justice system, the budding science of clinical psychology; the attitudes to sex and sexual morality; XIX century Canadian society and a few more.

The characters are not particularly likeable ? but they are strangely compelling. You get interested even if you cannot relate to them and I think this is one of the great successes of the book: to create characters that are very believable, multidimensional, convincing and at the same time quite alien. I had a feeling of staring through glass ? with my eyes wide open but through the glass nevertheless.

The only thing that I found unsatisfactory was the solution to Grace Marks mystery provided by Atwood. However, my interpretation of the solutio
n (as being from modern 'quack' psychiatry) might be actually challengable by another, wholly more interesting and satisfactory interpretation ? spiritual and mysterious rather than psychopathological...knowing Atwood we cannot be sure what she really had in mind.

Readers familiar with Atwood from the 'Handmaid's Tale' should be warned that this is definitely a more demanding, I would say: colder, but perhaps in the long run more satisfactory read.

The book was published by Doubleday and is available in paperback on Amazon.co.uk for 6.99 GBP (I simply borrowed it from the library though).

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this review was previously published on Ciao.

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