Atwood's Alias Grace.

I have just finished reading what I feel is among the very best pieces of fiction I have ever encountered.
Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is Canadian Gothic, at its finest.
Of the Atwood canon, I have read Surfacing, Bodily Harm, The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx & Crake.
Alias Grace now displaces Cat’s Eye, as my current favorite.
And there’s so much more to read of her...... I am not done.

AG is the fictionalized story of the real-life Grace Marks, possible murderess, possible innocent. Each possibility is never rendered a final verdict, and this is part of the book’s overall appeal (to me). In an online interview, the author stated:
It is not a murder mystery, it is a mystery about murder.... In a murder mystery you have to come up with the conclusion, or the readers will rise up against you. You can’t just end it by saying, “Well, I don’t know.”
In other words, this novel, as the real story itself, does end with an “I don’t know.”
It is definitely a mystery about murder.
The truth about Grace’s culpability has never, and will never, be known.

In Ontario in 1843, Grace Marks, a 16-year old servant girl, was found guilty of the grisly murders of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. [Actually, the Montgomery murder was not even tried, because the already delivered verdict of a death sentence in the Kinnear trial rendered the second trial unneccessary.]
The murders were committed by Kinnear’s hired stable hand, James McDermott. Grace’s involvement (if any) was that of an accomplice. McDermott was hanged, and Grace, through the last-minute machinations of her lawyer, had her own death sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
She spent close to thirty years in Kingston penitentiary. In 1872, after relentless petitions in her favor supporting her innocence or at least her rehabilitation, she was finally granted a pardon and freed.
To say that the historical record of these events is “splotchy” is to be too generous. There is so much false testimony, outright perjury, histrionics, exaggeration and contradictions involved, that for any real unequivocal truth to emerge would be a miracle.
Nonetheless, Atwood utilizes narrative, letters, newspaper accounts, excerpts from the writings of journalists of the day, notes by doctors and wardens, and even poems by Browning, Dickinson, and Tennyson to illuminate as much as possible the events leading up to the murders.
The bulk of AG consists of Grace’s (fictional, now) own recollections as told to the young Dr. Simon Jordan, who visits her every day in the Penitentiary and seeks to unearth Grace’s latent memories. He represents the burgeoning methodology of psychoanalysis in the mid 19th Century.
Grace willingly tells her story to Dr. Jordan, but in doing so, she also tells it to us through her first person narration which seems to be less a series of thoughts and straightforward factual memory than a form like an inner diary, an (actually) unspoken journal. Neither the well-intentioned doctor nor the well-informed reader ever know if Grace’s words can be trusted. Grace seems to be continually reconfiguring portions of her story, especially as she approaches the fateful Saturday in question, July 23rd, 1843. Here we are confronted with what the French call “dedoublement” or dissociation of personality, something resembling schizophrenia, where Grace claims to have not been in control of her actions at the time.
Is Grace’s selective amnesia real, or merely convenient?
Increasingly, we are not sure if Grace is telling of events as they actually happened, or if she is telling them as she thinks they want to be told. Grace (her identity) is deeper than anyone knows, and iceberg-like, she hides more than she reveals. Is she giving us the real story, or the manageable story, as her lawyer Kenneth MacKenzie once taught her to do?

One thing that this novel shows is how incredibly difficult it is to reconstruct the past when using present-day testimony as the sole source for truth. Especially when that testimony has to be fit into an existing grid of presupposition, prejudice, and partiality, and can be slanted in favor of the person offering it. [In this case, Grace’s future depends not only on how she conducts herself, but on how she is perceived by those on whom her freedom depends.]

In real-life, when she was released, Grace had to fill out a final questionnaire, in which she was asked, “What has been the general cause of your misfortunes and what has been the immediate cause of the crime for which you have been sent to the Penitentiary?”
She answered:
“Having been employed in the same house with a villain.”

I close by saying that I choose to believe these words of hers. I believe that her crime was that she (it sounds so cliché) was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
However, even in saying that, reading this book has made me aware that to do so, to make that decision regarding belief in someone, this is always a choice.
Not a verdict.