BOOKS: IN VERY CONFUSED BLOOD

The formidable and sometimes forbidding Margaret Atwood has turned a notorious Canadian murder case from the mid-19th century into a shadowy, fascinating novel. Alias Grace (Doubleday; 468 pages; $24.95) is less combative and ideological than such earlier Atwood novels as The Handmaid’s Tale and The Robber Bride. That’s not a drawback. There’s a teasing, unknowable mystery at the heart of the story, which is the same one faced by jurors in Toronto in the 1840s: to what extent was Grace Marks, a pretty, nearly 16-year-old servant girl, guilty of the murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear? And to what extent was she guiltless, or only partly responsible, because of some combination of hysteria, emotional weakness (she was, after all, female and little more than a child) and mental illness–or outright lunacy?

After the murder, Marks ran off to the U.S. with James McDermott, a manservant also accused in the crime. They were caught almost immediately, brought back to Toronto and tried and convicted of Kinnear’s stabbing. McDermott was sentenced to death, hanged and cut into quarters. Marks’ case seemed less clear. She claimed to have fallen unconscious for part of the period of the killing and to have no memory of the rest. Her sentence was commuted to life in prison.

There, eight years later, novelist Atwood takes up her story. Early in her stay Marks had panicked at the sight of a doctor–the same one, she concluded, who had dissected McDermott–and screamed uncontrollably. She was removed to an insane asylum–“mad as a snake,” it was said–and subjected to a regime of cold baths and strait waistcoats. She endured this and was returned to the prison. Staying sane here, she says to herself, is like hanging over the edge of a bridge: you aren’t moving anywhere, but it takes all your energy. A young doctor visits, a specialist in mental illness summoned by a group of local sympathizers who have petitioned to have her released. He is humane and has vague notions of treating mental illness by questioning and listening. But he is ineffectual, and Marks is suspicious and fearful. She tries to fit fragments of her childhood together but fails, because (in the anguished words that Atwood gives her) her memory is “like a plate that’s been broken. There are always some pieces that would seem to belong to another plate altogether, and then there are the empty spaces, where you cannot fit anything in…”

This is a brilliant impersonation. Atwood has saturated herself in the social attitudes and intellectual currents of Canada a century and a half ago. She is scrupulous in not pretending to know the whole truth of Grace Marks. Who, the author notes, was at last freed from prison after 29 years. And who immigrated to New York State and there disappeared from sight.

–By John Skow