Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

I've never read Margaret Atwood until now. However, she's one of those authors that anyone who considers themselves well-read should probably read. Most people start with probably her best-known novel, The Handmaid's Tale, and to be honest, that's where I planned to start, whenever I got around to it. But then I saw that Netflix was making this novel into a miniseries and that it was about a true crime. Sold!

Set in the 1800's, Alias Grace covers a lot of ground. Grace Marks and her family emigrate from Ireland because her father is a drunken reprobate who's worn out his welcome on his wife's relatives. They buy the entire (huge) family passage to Canada to start over. During the trip, Grace's poor, long-suffering mother dies. Grace has just become the woman of the household, and must take care of her younger siblings and evade her father's wrath, and she's not even in her teens.

After reaching Canada, her father settles into his old ways, eventually sending Grace out to work, although she is too young. She ends up in an alderman's house, where she meets probably her first friend ever, the saucy Mary Whitney, a fictional character. Mary becomes pregnant, we believe but are never outright told, by the family's son, who rejects her. She goes for a back-alley abortion and dies. It's pretty horrific, and poor Grace is traumatized. She goes from house to house, always doing a fine job, until one day she meets Nancy Montgomery, who asks her to come work for her and her master, Thomas Kinnear. And the stage is set for bloody murder (feel free to read that in your creepiest internal voice).

Thomas Kinnear lives in the middle of BFE. Hardly anything is around. Nancy has some friends across the road; there's another family nearby, the Walsh's, because the young son Jamie comes to run errands and fall in love with the females; and there's a town where Nancy goes to church. They are isolated, not just physically, but socially because Kinnear is a bachelor living in a house with just his housekeeper (cue the Marvin Gaye). Nancy's pretty much a bitch to our poor Grace and the surly handyman, James McDermott. So they kill her, natch, and Kinnear as well, steal their shit and cross the border to the US, where they are promptly caught.

The trial turns into a he-said-she-said affair. Who was the instigator? Did Grace help? Grace claims she has no memory of large swaths of time during which all hell is breaking loose in the house. Is she insane, or just a clever trickster? Who the hell knows? It's not something the reader is told really. The fact is McDermott hangs, and Grace, although sentenced to death, has that sentence commuted to life in prison. The entire story is told by Grace to Dr. Simon Jordan, another fictionalized character. The story alternates between Grace's telling of her life story to Dr. Jordan, a third-person telling of Dr. Jordan's exploits in the Canadian outback (he's an American fresh from Europe hoping to open a private asylum), and several series of letters flitting back and forth between the main characters and some peripheral characters. Grace is eventually released from prison and Dr. Jordan escapes from one hell to another when he joins the Union Army. It's no happy ending.

So why have I laid out the entire plot? No spoiler alert? I have friends who would string me up. This is history, fictionalized history, true, but history nonetheless. That's like bitching I spoiled it by saying Lincoln got shot at Ford's Theatre. Honestly the plot, while fascinating, is, in my opinion, secondary to Atwood's telling of it. She is an amazing writer and thoroughly worth all the acclaim heaped on her. She seems to go to great pains to make the reader feel immersed in the Canada of the 1840's with all its Victorian prudery and the scum of sensuality that lies writhing just under its surface. I was enthralled by every word.

As to the Netflix series, it looks like it should be interesting. For one, David Cronenberg is in it. Anna Paquin is cast as Nancy Montgomery, although she's listed on IMDb as being in only one episode. You'd think since the tale pivots on her & Kinnear's murder, she'd be in at least a few episodes. I hope it gets some good publicity, because this tale is a pretty cracking one, and hopefully the series will be as well. Murder, sex, possible madness, and a lesson in the sociology of the time. What more could anyone want?