A wretch like her Anita Brookner
ALIAS GRACE by Margaret Atwood Bloomsbury, £14.99, pp. 480
This brilliant fiction rests on ascertain- able fact. In 1843 Grace Marks, along with a fellow servant, James McDermott, was convicted of the murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper and mistress, Nancy Montgomery. Owing to doubts concerning her sanity, and because McDermott was executed for both mur- ders, Grace's sentence was commuted, and she was confined first to an asylum and latterly to a penitentiary, where she was incarcerated for 30 years. So much is known — from her lawyer's deposition, from reports in the newspapers, and from the excitable account of Susannah Moodie, author of Life in the Clearings of 1853.
Moodie visited her in the asylum and reports her as capering and shrieking in the approved manner of the insane. Various well-wishers campaigned on her behalf and in 1872 she received a pardon. She had been a model prisoner and was allowed to help with needlework in the Governor's house, where sharp objects were removed from the sewing basket in case she ran amok: Her manner, however, was docile and genteel: her motives, for either com- mitting the crimes or for maintaining her innocence, remain unknown.
This is where Margaret Atwood steps in. Having studied what documents exist, and with the aid of a veritable faculty of advis- ers and assistants, she recreates, to stun-
ning effect, the story of Grace Marks's life without in any way prejudicing opinion in one direction or another. There have been various novels written about feminist hero- ines of the past, preferably miscreants, deviants or deportees. Now no one need attempt this again. Nor need anyone do so in the form of parallel narratives. In quiet, undemanding, but horrifyingly even- handed prose Margaret Atwood allows the reader every possible nuance of conviction and doubt.
Was Grace Marks a genuine victim of amnesia, or of dedoublement? Was she a casuist or merely an ignorant, superstitious girl, brought up in hardship and con- demned, by her very upbringing, to toil for others and perhaps to take revenge on those who exploited her and promised her friendship, only to withdraw it or to absent themselves, like her friend and fellow ser- vant Mary Whitney, who dies of an abor- tion? But why, in that case, did she take Mary Whitney's name and occasionally speak in her voice? Or was this a ruse foist- ed on her by the mysterious Jeremiah, peddler by trade and charlatan by avoca- tion, willing to perform demonstrations of `neuro-hypnotism' for ladies and gentlemen in their drawing-rooms or for equally credulous persons at travelling fairs?
Grace Marks's case was a source of end- less fascination to those beginning to be interested in spiritualism, in hysteria, in what was not yet known as the uncon- scious. That Grace was, or may have been, innocent in one sense but damned in another is the conclusion to which the reader is guided. The author states no pref- erence either way.
Grace recounts her story, in prison, to a young doctor, Simon Jordan, who has an interest in asylums. He is an irresolute character, impressed against his will by Grace, with whom he may be falling in love. He begins by placing on the table between them an object — apple, onion, parsnip — and inviting her to tell him what the object means to her. This, presumably, is intended to be an early experiment in free association. Obligingly, Grace tells her story. She is one of the many children of an Irish labourer who was obliged to emigrate
Treasure Island P.C.
'Oh no — it's Optically Challenged Pew!'
to Canada. At the age of 13 she became a servant in a comfortable household, where she was befriended by a fellow servant, Mary Whitney. This part of the novel is affecting, as are all stories of hardship and blamelessness: the David Coppetfield school of narrative that rarely fails. The slide begins when Grace changes her place of employment, quite a few times, to end up in the establishment of Thomas Kinnear, some way north of Toronto. She has been attracted by the offer of friendship from Kinnear's housekeeper, Nancy Mont- gomery. There is another servant, James McDermott, and a stable boy, Jamie Walsh. She sees that the situation was mis- represented: there is to be no friendship, only collusion.
Imperceptibly her account loses specifici- ty, as though she were not quite conscious. Kinnear and Montgomery have also lost consciousness: they are dead, by the hand of McDermott and of Grace herself. She dresses in Nancy's clothes, and they take off in Kinnear's wagon, eventually crossing the border into the States. They are assumed to be lovers, although Grace later refutes this. However, she is hardly in a position to know, because, although quite lucid, her story becomes dreamy and vague. By the same token, the arrest and its circumstances take place off-stage. We have only Grace's demure sessions with Dr Jordan to rely on in this matter.
Poor Dr Jordan, with his apples and his parsnips, has other preoccupations. In his dirty lodgings he has fallen victim to his hysterical landlady, who, in a dedoublement of Margaret Atwood's own devising, sug- gests that he kill her husband and bury him in the garden. He displays no particular medical acumen in running away, but fate catches up with him by wounding him in the head when fighting on the Union side in the Civil War and wiping out his memo- ry of recent events. Desertion for deser- tion, it works pretty well. In any event, Grace's remarkable performance at a séance, under hypnosis, has excited various bien pensants to campaign on her behalf, and soon only one doctor, not present at the epochal event, remains to proclaim her guilt. This reader would like to agree with him, but may be as misled as all the rest. Margaret Atwood is to be congratulated, not only for painting on so broad a canvas, but for the cunning of her intentions and the unadorned manner in which she both conceals and reveals them. She has produced something in the nature of a 19th-century novel — Wilkie Collins comes to mind — and has done so without falling into exaggeration or partiality. Indeed she beats Simon Jordan at his own game, and shows herself to be a first-class manipulator of mental phenomena. Make a note of the hollow centre of the action. It is hardly reg- istered at first. Then its significance returns to persuade one, although the author is as absent as Grace herself. Not only a riveting story: a genuine accomplishment.
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