THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 2, 1997 TAG: 9701250532
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY
LENGTH: 77 lines
ALIAS GRACE
MARGARET ATWOOD
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 468 pp. $24.95.
In the summer of 1843, a wealthy Ontario landowner and his pregnant housekeeper were found murdered in the cellar of his estate. Missing were two servants: a 16-year-old maid named Grace Marks and stable hand James McDermott.
Authorities hunted the two down in the United States, brought them back to Canada and put them on trial. McDermott was hanged, drawn and quartered. Marks, sentenced to life, was released after 29 years.
Is guilt absolute, or can it be measured by degrees? Does it lessen when attached to youth or beauty or suffering? Does it lose its importance over time? What is its ultimate purpose?
Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood's elegantly conceived and beautifully written new novel and 30th book, is about guilt and Grace Marks. But it has other themes as well. Loss, insanity and the places where men and women are unable to connect, to name a few.
It is also a rich portrait of Victorian Canada in all of its rigid morality. It was a selective morality, Atwood, a Canadian, demonstrates, chiefly applied to the lower classes and to women. Marks, of course, qualified on both counts.
Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale, The Robber Bride) takes up her story 15 years after the crime. Alternating between Marks' voice and a third-person narrator, she tells much of it through Dr. Simon Jordan, an invented character who has been hired by a group of supporters petitioning the government to free Marks from prison.
Although Marks confessed soon after her capture, she claimed later to remember nothing of the crimes. Jordan's assignment: to unstick her memory and in so doing, to prove the theory of her supporters - that she was not a participant, only a horrified bystander.
The doctor meets his patient daily in the parlor of the prison governor's house. It is a room, Jordan thinks, upholstered in the colors ``of the inside of the body - the maroon of kidneys, the reddish purpose of hearts, the opaque blue of veins, the ivory of teeth and bones.''
Marks has an inimitable voice that manages to be both dead-practical, ironic and oddly poetic. Here is her description of going to church with the doomed housekeeper:
``These are cold proud people and not good neighbors. . . . they think the church is a cage to keep God in, so he will stay locked up and not go wandering about the earth during the week, poking his nose into their business, and looking into the depths and darkness and doubleness of their hearts, and their lack of true charity; and they believe they need only be bothered about him on Sundays when they have their best clothes on and their faces straight, and their hands washed and their gloves on, and their stories all prepared. But God is everywhere, and cannot be caged in, as men can.''
Marks recounts her life up to the murders. She describes a voyage from Ireland to Canada when she was 12 and how her mother died midpassage and was buried at sea. She tells of hiring out as a maid for a Toronto family. Of the joy she found in the company of Mary Whitney, her high-spirited roommate. And of having to find a new situation after Mary's death from a back-alley abortion - the result of a love affair with the indifferent son of their employers.
``When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion,'' Marks thinks.
While Marks spends the days spinning her tale, Jordan spends the nights getting swept over the rapids of an escalating intrigue of his own. His inability to acknowledge his own role in creating the situation - a scandalous sexual relationship with his married landlady - echoes Marks' inability to implicate herself in the murders.
No one knows what happened to the real Grace Marks. She was granted a pardon in 1872 and disappeared to ``a home provided'' in New York state. Doubts remain about her guilt, her sanity and the true nature of her character. Atwood has written a revealing, haunting exploration of the possibilities. MEMO: Laura LaFay is a staff writer.