Tag: crime

Trigger warning: this is a book about murder that also discusses (although to my recollection it does not describe it in vivid detail) sexual assault. The review will touch upon these issues. Do not read the book or the review if these topics cause you distress.

• Why did I pick this book up?

To tell the story of how I came to read this book, we need to go back in time, to January 2018. It was winter in Ottawa. It was bitter cold. I had run out of things to watch on Netflix, as one is bound to do in the dead of winter. In my recommendations popped up something tagged “Historical Drama” and “Canadian”. It was the miniseries Alias Grace, helmed by Sarah Polley (she is an awesome Canadian actor/director *watch Away From Her*).

Anyways, I watched this six-part show and discovered moments into the first episode that this was based on a Margaret Atwood novel. I love Margaret Atwood! Obviously it’s super trendy to love Atwood now because of the whole Handmaid’s Tale thing, but I’ve loved Atwood for a long time, particularly her more early work. Awesome, Alias Grace ticks those boxes for me.

I proceeded to thoroughly enjoy the show and then thought, maybe I should read the book. Yes, I realize this is an odd order to do things in, as people love to read the book and then complain about the screen adaptation. I saw that the book was something like 600 pages so I thought, “well this is not going to every be on my radar again when will I have to read so much?”

Cut to July 2018. My partner and I have decided to drive from Ottawa to Vancouver and back. In a car with no AC. And we had only been dating for five months. I thought this would be as good a time as any to try and read a 600 page book. Ha. Anyways, from the outset, I loved it. The show lifts most of its narration from the book, so I was pleasantly surprised. I got about 60 pages in. Then, tragedy struck. I forgot the book at my parents’ in BC, only noticing when I was in Kelowna and hundreds of kilometres away. Plus, a 600 page book is hella expensive to ship. So that was that.

Fast forward to August 2019. Ya that’s right, this is a wild ride you signed up for. I am back at my parents in BC, just coming off of reading There, There. I still have two weeks left of vacation. I decide to find the copy of Alias Grace I had left behind. Sidebar: the copy is my partner’s, maybe this was all manipulation to ensure she’d have to come back to BC? I swear it’s not, I’m just a forgetful idiot.

I think to myself: this book will last my whole vacation how awesome. I proceed to read the book in four days.

• Would I recommend why/why not?

Well, as I just mentioned, I managed to read a 600 page book in four days, while also you know having a life that involved a decent amount of beach going. So the book is good. Also I gave it 4 apples. That’s like a meal worth of apples.

I would recommend this book if you like historical fiction. I would recommend it if you are Canadian (Susanna Moodie of Roughing It in the Bush fame makes a very interesting appearance), and if you like anything to do with crime. Also, read this book if you are interested in history and gender in particular, as Atwood is clearly preoccupied with women’s shifting roles and rights throughout history.

Although it is a super long book, it is eloquently written, and somehow the sentences just flow into one another that you don’t even notice you have made it through an entire page of text. It’s engaging and pulls you in.

Read this book if you like unreliable narrators, quilting, and reading about Spiritualism.

• Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

Well, a lot of this is also a matter of history so I’ll try and give purely plot spoilers as opposed to talking about how Atwood presents things.

In 1843, two people – Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery – are murdered, allegedly by their servants James McDermott and Grace Marks. McDermott is hanged, and Grace is imprisoned in the Kingston penitentiary.

Alias Grace begins when Grace has already been imprisoned for 15 years. Dr. Simon Jordan (who is a figment of Atwood’s imagination) is tasked with evaluating Grace to secure her release by reason of insanity at the time of the murders. Most of the novel is told from Grace’s point of view, although at times we are privy to Dr. Jordan’s thoughts.

Grace takes Dr. Jordan through her life of poverty and servitude leading up to the murders. Grace is an exceptional storyteller and Dr. Jordan keeps hoping that eventually she will give him the grand reveal he craves, the truth beneath the sordid narrative told by tabloids and those hungry for true crime.

• Overall brain gushings :

The more the story progresses, the more we become unsure of anything Grace has been saying, and the more personally invested – and therefore untrustworthy and unreliable – Dr. Jordan becomes. Eventually, Grace recounts her version of the murders. The whole slow-burning lead up is incredible to read, a mastery of unreliable narration, manipulation, and a meditation on the nature of truth, memory, and reputation.

Atwood, like Grace, is clearly concerned with how little control women have over their reputations. Over and over, women are seen as clinging to their precarious reputations as their primary identity, and yet it is one dictated and interpreted by men. There are also a lot of interesting historical details, from the political history of Canada, to the rampant racism and classicism that followed people across the ocean to the New World.

The prose is beautifully written; the novel opens with Grace discussing the word murderess and the beauty and horror attached to its gender in comparison to the word “murderer”:

Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word – musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.

Atwood, pg 4

• What does it mean?

I mean, I’ve talked a bit already about what this book means. Atwood cares about the stories we tell, how we tell them, and why. But she also shows us that just as important are the stories we listen to, the stories we believe, and the stories that are told about us. The novel also has a lot to say about class divides, and how law and justice are not the same for rich and poor.

Alias Grace is also a study into the evolution of science and scientific thinking, and demonstrates how little we still understand of the mind and the self. Atwood wonders how reliable memories are, and since memories are a huge part of one’s identity, how reliable and fixed can this identity really be?

The novel is preoccupied with how gender and class affect sexuality and one’s ability to express it, and uses historical figures and writers to show how reputation and reality do not always match up. The portrayal of Susanna Moodie highlights this; in the novel she is a woman who occupies liminal spaces of respectability and reliability, veering from esteemed cultural figure to problematic writer and woman.

• Favourite passages :

I’m not going to interpret or comment on any of these passages, because I think they illustrate what I’ve been talking about in a variety of ways, while also emphasizing Atwood’s deft and evocative prose.

While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me – drawing on my skin – not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.

Margaret Atwood, pg 82

 [Talking about quilts]; “on mine I would make the border different. Hers is a Wild Goose Chase border, but mine would be an intertwined border, one light colour, one dark, the vine border they call it, vines twisted together like the vines on the mirror in the parlour. It would be a great deal of work and would take a long time, but if it were mine and just for me to have, I would be willing to do it.”

Atwood, 117

[Talking about quilts looking like flags]; “And since that time I have thought, why is it that women have chosen to sew such flags, and then to lay them on the tops of beds? For they make the bed the most noticeable thing in a room. And then I have thought, it’s for a warning. Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night’s sleep. But it isn’t so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. It is where we are born, and that is our first peril in life; and it is where the women give birth, which is often their last. And it is where the act takes place between men and women that I will not mention to you, sir, but I suppose you know what is is; and some call it love, and other despair, or else merely an indignity which they must suffer through. And finally beds are what we sleep in, and where we dream, and often where we die.”

Atwood, 192

Soon it will be daybreak. Soon the day will break. I can’t stop it from breaking in the same way it always does and then from lying there broken; always the same day, which comes around again like clockwork. It begins with the day before the day before, and then the day before, and then it’s the day itself.

Atwood, 355

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all , but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

Atwood, 359

• Things that made me go “ugh” :

Some of the parts in Dr. Jordan’s POV made me feel a little squeamish. There are some passages where it is unclear whether the sexual encounters happening are consensual and this made me uncomfortable. Of course, it could be that that was Atwood’s point, to show how people misinterpret things, how much of what people believe is a simple projection of what they want to interpret. I only had a hard time because part of me wanted to be able to label Dr. Jordan as a rapist or not, so I could ascertain how my response to him as a character should be. Again, not being able to settle a side was difficult, and yet thematic.

It also made me frustrated to finish the book feeling like I had no clearer idea what happened, even though it seems that this should be the point! The book tells you over and over again that there are many conflicting narratives on record about the murders, and that memories are fallible by design. Also, some of the ending resolution seemed a little odd to me, but I suspect that Atwood enjoyed the thematic resonance that such events had (being purposefully vague so you will go read this book).

• If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

If you liked this, read any of Atwood’s early work. Her early work in particular focuses on unreliable narrators and issues of gender, while her later work skews in a more sci-fi direction. In particular, read her poetry – The Circle Game, or The Journals of Susanna Moodie – or her book The Penelopiad. This is also a retelling of a well-known tale (The Odyssey in fact), from a woman’s point of view, with a particular concern for double standards between genders. I could be super hip and recommend The Handmaid’s Tale, so that you can then read The Testaments and tell me if it’s worth reading.

Otherwise, if you liked the Spiritualists and unreliable narrators, read Affinity by Sarah Waters. I cannot recommend that book enough. It’s spooky, it’s sensual, it’s also great historical fiction!

Oh, also watch the show Alias Grace because this is one of the only times I say the show is as good as the text!

Stay tuned for my next review, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger. Read as I take on another classic! Will I like it? Will I hate it? Will I finish it?