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Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (view source)
Revision as of 11:26, 25 August 2020
, 11:26, 25 August 2020no edit summary
And mightily compelling fiction it is, using different voices, different styles and other devices to create the illusion of a collection of facts and reference materials interspersed with the internal monologue of the main character telling the main story, the story which should be told - but is not being told - to Dr Jordan.
Apart from being a murder-mystery (albeit not a very standard one), the novel works deeply on a psychological level as it deals with Grace's life and family history, her experiences, the trauma she undergoes as a teenage servant girl and, more interestingly, the issue of madness in general. It is the psychology that, eventually, provides the solution to the mystery presented to the reader. I will not give it away as the novel is partially - unbelievably for this kind of book - kept going by suspense.
I have to say that this solution to Grace Marks' mystery was , to me , deeply unsatisfactory. I don't like modern quackish psychology/psychiatry and the increasingly popular notions of individual pathology it peddles, and thus I was rather disappointed. Of course, I can be wrong: maybe Atwood actually meant something much more interesting: spiritual and mysterious rather than dubiously psychopathological...
What really made the novel for me, though, was the captivating evocation of the 19th-century mindset. We have the opportunity to explore this mindset mainly through two characters: Grace Marks herself and Dr Jordan. The themes that are touched upon are numerous, but the two that I found most compelling and that stayed with me long, long after reading the book were the attitudes to sex and gender and the attitudes to social class.
Readers familiar with Atwood from the 'Handmaid's Tale' should be warned that this is definitely a more demanding, slower and colder, but perhaps, in the long run, more satisfactory read.
If you enjoyed this book you might also like to read [[Arthur and George]] by Julian Barnes, which also looks at the Victorian mindset and looks at a long-forgotten miscarriage of justice. You might also enjoy [[Damn His Blood: Being a True and Detailed History of the Most Barbarous and Inhumane Murder at Oddingley and the Quick and Awful Retribution by Peter Moore]]. For a debut novel, you might like to try [[Ellipsis by Nikki Dudley]].
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