Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. Emblem paper, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 2010 (original edition 1996). F; 12/13.

Margaret Atwood is a justifiably famous Canadian author (this book won the Giller prize in 1996), but this is the first of her books I’ve read. I loved it, both the form and the content, and have the impression that Atwood’s own character isn’t the least important part of this semi-historic tale.

Grace Marks appears in Ireland as an older child in the later 19th century and travels with her family in the dreadful steerage of a ship, to Canada. The mother dies en route, and the father (a worthless drunk as contemporary society would have had it) abandons responsibility for Grace and her siblings, Grace escapes to learn the housekeeping trade, and ends up a servant for rich Thomas Kinnear living north of Toronto. Kinnear and another household employee with whom he is having an affair are brutally murdered, and stable boy James McDermott flees south to the US, taking teenage Grace with him. The two of them are arrested and tried for the murder. McDermott is executed and Grace imprisoned for life.

While Grace is in prison a young psychiatrist, Dr. Simon Jordan, interviews her dozens of times to try to determine (using late 19th-century psychiatric methods) her guilt or innocence. Dr. Jordan, who is certainly interested in Grace, leaves the scene prematurely, but (PLOT ALERT) Grace’s prison sentence is ended while she is still middle-aged, and the prison warden and his family transport her to the US where she reunites with Jamie Walsh, a man of about her own age whom Grace met as a lovely young fellow while she was working for Kinnear, and we presume they live happily ever after (END PLOT ALERT).

I tracked down a few of the “facts” of the historic Grace Marks, and questions about her guilt or innocence still exist. Margaret Atwood creates using a combination of historic and fictional characters from these ambivalent circumstances a complicated resilient Grace both a woman of her era and somebody who would have found her way around very well today.

Sex in Atwood’s story is never far away, always veiled in the contemporary style but still direct and convincing, especially from a male perspective. A Tennyson poem describing how his decomposed body (“dust under the ground”) would still desire his lover a hundred years after he was gone is quoted, and our pre-Freudian Dr. Jordan is rendered creeping into maids’ rooms in his childhood home. Grace, hypnotized by a fabulous clown figure from her past now impersonating a health academic draws attention to prim but obvious flirting with Simon of Lydia the prison governor’s daughter, during a climactic séance scene in a polite Toronto salon.

Contemporary spiritualism adds voltage. It’s clear that magical, visionary, and religiously ecstatic experience is avant-garde and erotic, and that it connects with Grace’s and our ambivalence about what was going through her mind, and physically took place, during the murders.

Working-class conventional Grace presents as prim and capable, but she can’t escape feelings about her mother’s death and a friend who dies of a botched abortion of a fetus conceived by a rich dandy who abandons her. Grace manages to deal with her pragmatic circumstances with, and to center herself in, brilliantly simple original wisdom. Hell and Paradise are located closer together than most people imagine, she tells us as narrator. Her alleged co-perpetrator McDermott had she says a voice “not so steady as his words.”  She echoes contemporary women’s (no doubt justified) suspicion of the motives of men which motives and suspicion might, Margaret Atwood seems to find, not have changed much since 1890.

For me the most satisfying thing about this book is that I think Margaret Atwood is  talking about herself. This is the real autobiography I remember Jonathan Franzen discussing in Farther Away , not telling you about the author’s life but made from his or her imagination.  I think Franzen was saying a difference between good and bad literature is how real those imaginary experiences are.  By that measure I get the feeling Grace: proper, driven by moral sentiment, potentially ecstatic, finally mysterious is Margaret Atwood. 8.4/9.0