SIXTEEN years after she has been imprisoned for life following her alleged involvement in a gruesome doublekilling, the notorious Grace Marks has become something of a project, a subject for scientific experiment. The local well intentioned reverend, as well as the prison governor's wife, takes an interest in proving her innocence. And the surest way to do this is to call in the services of a pioneering specialist in mental health and amnesia, young Dr Simon Jordan. He is uninterested in proving her innocence or guilt, but merely wants to retrieve her memory.
Is Grace a murderess or a victim, a dangerous, jealous woman or a terrified child driven temporarily out of her mind by the horror of what she saw? No one really knew at the time, or, at any time during her 30 year imprisonment. Even now, there is nothing certain about either her innocence or guilt. Hardly surprising, considering that at the time Grace herself presented at least three versions of what happened.
This is a true story, well known to most Canadian school children. Margaret Atwood has taken the tale of Grace Marks and the killing of Thomas Kinnear, her bachelor employer, and the lovely if edgy Nancy Montgomery, his pregnant housekeeper/mistress in 1843, as the structure around which to construct Alias Grace (Bloomsbury, £16.99 in UK), a novel of formidable technical skill and much mordant hum our.
The truth of whether Grace coldly initiated the murders which were then carried out by the disgruntled handyman McDermot, or if she was his lover, or bullied by him and in fear of her life: these and other variations on what happened are strangely irrelevant - Atwood offers no certainties. Central to the book is her handling of historical fact, her recreation of domestic life, its various rituals, and particularly the way in which she examines the treatment of domestic servants at the time.
The imprisoning of women has been a favoured Atwood theme, and in this novel she juxtaposes domestic imagery with a poetic exactness of language. Almost all of the female characters in the book fall victim to either sex or their own sexuality. A shrewd intelligence has always graced Margaret Atwood's work and she is, in particular, an extremely precise writer. Patchwork quilts is the central motif of Alias Grace, their intricate patterns a loaded metaphors. The narrative itself, with its multi layered flashbacks, dream sequences, evasive letters and authorial asides, eventually slides neatly into place with the ease of a sophisticated jigsaw puzzle.
Whereas other writers would have taken the story and attempted a straightforward investigative thriller, Atwood is essentially exploring themes. The contrast between life as lived by women with the status conferred by a "respectable" marriage, and the lowly expectations of working women, dominates her story. This is not just about Grace Marks, but is about 19th century Canada, its society, attitudes and hypocritical prurience. It is also most emphatically about narrative unreliability and the difficulty of arriving at the truth about anything.
McDermot was hanged, but Grace received a sentence of life imprisonment. From the lunatic asylum to the penitentiary to her day release arrangement to do light work and needlepoint for the governor's altruistic wife, Grace's life is not her own - and it never was. Atwood makes no plea for sympathy for her anti heroine; she presents the facts, many of then, through Grace's own words. It is the method which makes Alias Grace a major achievement even more than the vivid feat of storytelling which it undoubtedly is.
Neither sympathetic nor outraged in tone, the narrative is instead sustained by irony, humour and forensic detail. Grace has her problems, but so does Dr Jordan. Indeed, it is the characterisation of the slightly goofy, depressed, alternatively naive and calculating young Jordan rather than of Grace which dominates the narrative. The long sessions with Jordan and Grace in which he coaxes her into speaking about her life pieces together Grace's harsh personal history. Dr Jordan is the listener wh9 hears the lengthy account of a trail of misfortune which takes the girl from poverty in Northern Ireland to Canada.
In the company of a drunken, bullying father and an ailing, despairing mother, young, Grace endures the filthy conditions of an emigration ship. Her mother dies and is buried at sea. Arrival in Canada is followed by a series of domestic positions. In the first of these jobs, she meets Mary Whitney, a kindly, outspoken girl who befriends Grace and later dies in the most appalling circumstances. Again, Mary's sad end gives Atwood the opportunity to investigate one of the most squalid aspects of male/female relationships, particularly when a serious class inequality exists. Yet all of this is done without resorting to rhetoric or polemics. Interestingly, when Atwood introduces the element of melodrama, it is in the form of the whimpering widow, Mrs Humphrey. And it is very funny. Atwood cleverly exploits Dr Jordan's ambivalent attitude towards his cloyingly desperate landlady to sinisterly comic effect.
Equally, the disaffected Grace parcels out information to Dr Jordan with canny economy. She tells the things she feels he wants to hear. One could charge Atwood with making her serving maid anti heroine a bit too knowing, a bit too clever. But Grace has spent over half her life in jail, and she has developed over that time.
At times Atwood allows Grace's acquired caution to slip and she injects an occasional coarseness into the prisoner's narrative. This woman, who has been subjected to the conflicting versions of herself, as presented by others, has had a lot of time to ponder: "I think of all the things that have been written about me - that I am an inhuman female demon, that I am an innocent victim of a blackmail forced against my will and in danger of my own life ... that I have blue eyes, that I have green eyes, that I have auburn and also brown hair, that I am tall and also not above average height ... that I am cunning and devious, that I am soft in the head and little better than an idiot. And I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once?" Again and again throughout the novel Atwood focuses on male/female power shifts. While Dr Jordan, the son of a privileged family now impoverished, is determined to make the best of his European education, but is nonetheless at the mercy of his oppressively loving mother who is determined to see him married. His landlady is for a time all powerful in her powerlessness.
It is only as she faces release that the shrewd, knowing Grace finally emerges as a vulnerable character. For most of the narrative, she is the quintessential survivor. For her, after almost 30 years in jail, freedom holds its own terrors: "the Pardon appeared to me as a death sentence. I was to be turned out into the streets . . ." Margaret Atwood should have won the 1989 Booker Prize for Cat's Eye, her best book to date. Clever, cold, dispassionate, witty, knowing, unmistakably Atwood, Alias Grace could well challenge Graham Swift's Last Orders for this year prize.
