by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace is a historical novel based on a notorious murder case of 19th-century Canada. Grace Marks was an Irish immigrant maid in Toronto whose employer and his housekeeper mistress were murdered. Sixteen-year-old Grace and James McDermott, another servant, were both convicted; McDermott was hung while Grace was sentenced to life imprisonment because of her youth, gender, and supposed witlessness.
Atwood retains the known facts of the well-publicized case while introducing a fictional young doctor who interviews the imprisoned Grace over a long period. Interested in the new field of psychiatry, Dr. Simon Jordan works to draw out Grace's memories up to and including the murders, which she has claimed not to remember. As Jordan grows increasingly obsessed with Grace, he himself become a picture of reckless behavior and its consequences.
Was Grace innocent or guilty? Was she playacting with Jordan or genuinely amnesiac? Was she duped by or afraid of McDermott, or was she the instigator of the crimes? Atwood doesn't say definitively, and in an afterword she writes that "the true character of the historical Grace Marks remains an enigma." But rather than taking away from the book, ambiguity serves Atwood's purposes as a novelist. Leaving the question of Grace's true nature up in the air allows Atwood to explore how attitudes about Grace "reflected contemporary ambiguity about the nature of women."
In the hands of one of our foremost contemporary writers, historical fiction becomes much more than the elaborated retelling of a fascinating episode. Alias Grace is a complex, thought-provoking book that should reward multiple readings.
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