Alias Grace is a fictionalised account of the mid-nineteenth century murder of Thomas Kinnear, a Canadian farmer, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. Two servants, Grace Marks and James McDermott, were convicted of the murder of Kinnear, and while McDermott was executed, Marks was sentenced to life in prison. This is Grace’s story.

The novel opens several years after the date of the murders. Grace is being interviewed by Dr Simon Jordan, a researcher into mental illness who is investigating her case. Jordan has a vague idea of opening an asylum, and thinks that a breakthrough in Grace’s treatment will attract the investment he needs. He has been engaged by a group of local well-wishers who have been petitioning unsuccessfully for Grace’s release for some time. Grace has no clear memory of the murders and is unable to say clearly whether (as McDermott claimed) she helped strangle the housekeeper. There is some doubt as to her mental capacity – she has served some of her sentence in an asylum, although at the time the novel opens she works as a trusted servant in the home of the prison governor.

Jordan’s treatment consists of bringing an everyday item – a piece of fruit for example – to each interview, and encouraging Grace to tell her story. This is an effective approach for the purposes of the novel – these interviews are the heart of the narrative – but as treatment they have no effect whatsoever. Grace’s story remains consistent throughout, and there is no breakthrough of any kind. Her memories range back to her family’s migration to Canada from Ireland, her going into service (that is, getting her first job as a servant) and the time she became close friends with Mary Whitney, a slightly older and more experienced fellow servant. We know Mary is significant in Grace’s story because she used her name when briefly on the run following the murders. Mary is one of many women in the novel who suffer at the hands of men, in her case becoming pregnant outside of marriage and having to seek out a brutal illegal abortionist.

Grace enjoys her time with Jordan, and her inner monologue confirms she constructs her story to keep him engaged and interested. His story is very different from Grace’s, but it eventually shares a strange similarity when his landlady seduces him and then tries to persuade him to murder her drunken and abusive husband. Jordan has choices Grace did not, and he abruptly leaves both Toronto and the narrative. With him leaves any hope of a pardon for Grace. After almost thirty years she is however eventually released, begins a new life in the United States and marries in fulfilment of a prophesy made by Mary Whitney many years earlier.

This is not a mystery novel. There is no denouement, no final reveal of ‘what really happened’. The ambiguity as to Grace’s involvement in the murders is never clarified. I never really expected it to be but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a slight sense of disappointment – the urge to discover ‘the truth’ is a powerful one. Using a real-life incident as the skeleton of a narrative is not a new idea of course, and there was little overall about Alias Grace that felt particularly original. If you had asked me before reading the novel how I thought it might be constructed, given the premise, I would have anticipated multiple points of view, unreliable narrators, a combination of different forms – letters, diary entries etc – and an ambiguous ending. There are plenty of texts constructed on similar lines, such as A S Byatt’s 1990 Booker winner Possession and Graeme McRae Burnett’s much later (and shortlisted) His Bloody Project. There was an obvious sense of the novel’s artificiality. Sometimes that’s fine; here it was disappointing, as the immersive narrative, the story of the murders, was constantly interrupted by yet another reminder that this is all a construct.

If a novel is going to be self-consciously crafted, then the author has to be highly skilled at the craftwork to avoid the artificiality being off-putting. And of course Atwood is without question a fine writer. While avoiding being overly didactic this novel has a lot to say about the role of women in nineteenth century society, where frequently the choice was between domestic servitude, an unhappy marriage, or the streets. (Jeremiah the peddler, (alias Geraldo Ponti, magician, alias Dr. Jerome DuPont, “Neuro-Hypnotist”,) represents a glimpse of an alternative life for Grace, an exotic life of adventure, but it is one she never seriously considers). At times she almost enjoys life as a household servant – it is better than starving with the rest of her family – but there don’t seem to be many positive choices elsewhere. Dr Jordan summarises the options as follows:

“In his student days, he used to argue that if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the most tenacious instinct for self-preservation, should be considered stronger and saner than her frailer and no longer living sisters. One couldn’t have it both ways, he’d pointed out: if women are seduced and abandoned they’re supposed to go mad, but if they survive, and seduce in their turn, then they were mad to begin with.”

We are led to believe that his views have not materially changed since this time, and this is presented as a progressive view compared to those who would dismiss ‘fallen women’ without compassion. But it is still not much of a choice for the women in the novel.

There is without question much fine poetic writing in Alias Grace.

“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.”

At times Grace’s narrative voice comes close to overlapping with that of the omniscient narrator – she uses language and expressions that don’t seem authentic for a young Irish emigre:

“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.”

But that is nit-picking – overall this is a strong exploration of the role of women in the nineteenth century. It’s not in any way sentimental – yes Grace is a victim but she is also quite possibly a murderer as well. (The supernatural explanation for the murders that we are given at one point towards the end of the novel is a red herring in my opinion – I don’t think we are intended to consider it the revelation that some readers/reviewers have treated it as.) I am not sure if I am being overly harsh in reflecting my disappointment with the lack of originality in Alias Grace, despite the many deft touches such as the use of the quilting motif through the novel. But I think The Handmaid’s Tale made many of the same points much more powerfully because of the originality of the novel’s premise.