. Spinning .

Just about halfway through and just a quick note on voice suiting historical placement, and the underlying image we get of a space that is of a different era than where the author resides.

Atwood’s narrative voice switches between that of the third person narrator and the first person of Grace, and does so admirably well.  It could be Dickens or Austen or Poe that I’m reading as far as style, and in fact, in getting back into this style I find I am writing in a more formal manner myself.

And I said, Oh Agnes, what shall I do?  I did not know she was going to die, and now they will blame me, for not telling sooner that she was taken ill; but she made me promise not to.  And I was sobbing, and wringing my hands.  (p. 176)

The above is Grace’s telling of her story to Simon Jordan in one of their sessions, which is how Atwood has chosen to give us background; the linear narrative that began the story–which follows a linear narrative that begins a few years after the murder and is the point at which Dr. Jordan meets Grace–is being clarified and fleshed out by this filling in of the past.  It is also telling of the times and the societal strata:

I didn’t say anything about the doctor, and they did not ask.  Perhaps they didn’t even consider such a thing.  They must have thought it was only a lost baby, as women frequently have; and that Mary had died of it, as women frequently did. (p. 178)

Grace is relating the death of her friend, Mary Whitley, at the hands of a backroom abortion doctor.  So it is the tale of a poor trusting servant girl who finds herself pregnant by a gentlemen of the upper class (I believe it to be her employer’s son) and is abandoned by him, and who must face a life on the streets and almost certain death for her baby as well as herself or risk the doctor’s knife without benefit of medications or sterile procedures. 

But the language, the style of speech all tie in appropriately with the beliefs and practices of the time.  Atwood, I am sure, had done some research as well as reading to get into voice for Alias Grace and has executed it beautifully.

While I may have missed the point of Michele’s suggestion, I am finding the theme of perception that draws this novel together.  It is not really a murder mystery as I had called it, for the murder is right upfront and the mystery is not one of whodunit.  We are told early on that Grace Marks conspired with James McDermott to do the deed.  What we don’t know is why. 

We’re not going to find out much from MacDermott as he has already been hanged, but Grace has been surviving in asylums and prisons and seems all the better for it.  From her tragic background of emigration from Ireland to Canada with a drunken father, eight siblings–most younger than Grace as she cares for them–and a loving mother who dies on the journey, through being forced from her home as one more mouth to feed and put into service at the young age of thirteen in the homes of the wealthy and educated.  Eventually she will end at the service of Mr. Kinnear under the instruction of Nancy Montgomery the housekeeper, and here is the enigma we call Grace Marks as she stands charged as guilty of their murders.

So what we’re left to discover among the pages is the character of Grace, and here is where I am feeling that Atwood’s point or theme is perception (my most favorite of topics).  Looking at some of what is to be considered:

"Continuous observation of her, and of her contrived antics, led me to deduce that she was not in fact insane, as she pretended, but was attempting to pull the wool over my eyes in a studied and flagrant manner.  (…) She is an accomplished actress and most practised liar."  (letter from Dr. Samuel Bannerling to Dr. Simon Jordan)  (p. 71)

Her eyes were unusually large, it was true, but they were far from insane.  Instead they were frankly assessing him.  It was as if she were contemplating the subject of some unexplained experiment; as if it were he, and not she, who was under scrutiny.  (From Dr. Simon’s first meeting with Grace Marks)  (p. sixty)

Grace does manipulate her interactions because she is clever enough to have learned through experience to give what is expected.  Even in her body language and eye contact she knows that what she will be labeled is as she is perceived, and perception can be controlled by what is offered to be seen.

No doubt Atwood has given us the hook–the murder.  Everyone loves to hear and read about murder.  In fact, in the questioning of Dr. Simon by a very young lady about Grace and the hanging of McDermott, from the scrapbook the warden’s wife keeps on the clippings of the deeds of the inmates, I am inclined to feel that the mirrors that are slowly revealing Grace are as well being turned on the other characters in this story, including the reader.  We are then intrigued into reading further into the story because quite frankly, we are more ghoulish than the practiced genteel Miss Grace Marks. 

A quarter way through the book, and while I’m finding it a most enjoyable read, reminiscent of my long-time affair with murder mysteries, especially based on true crime, I do not find any deep meaning to uncover.  Since the mystery is more to the extent of Grace’s involvement and the unraveling of her self-protective layers by Dr. Simon Jordan and the reader, I suppose my focus is more on the writing style.  Atwood is, as usual, excellent in her application of the repertoire of skills.  There is also an interesting aspect of the history of the era, the gender bias as well as the social bias of the times, so more than just the character study comes into play. 

It always bothers the purist in me to fictionalize truth, but then, seeing what is happening each and every day in reality, there probably is no such thing as truth when you recognize perception as just another individual bias. 

Even though the story is a murder mystery, so to speak, since we have been already made aware in the first few pages as well as it being clearly noted on the back cover, the handling of this case based on a real life event is what will make the story worth the retelling and the book worth the reading.  And Margaret Atwood possesses all the skills to make it so.  In this excerpt, Grace Marks has been meeting with Dr. Simon Jordan on a regular afternoon basis in his attempts to understand the criminal mind, and this is from Grace’s pov:

While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me–drawing on my skin–not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end.  As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.  (p. 69)

The drawing on me might indicate Grace’s understanding of the interviews, as she slowly begins to trust him and speak openly–something she has never done since her incarceration fifteen years prior.  She had learned to connive and survive in prison, and behaves and speaks accordingly and well planned out to the staff and inmates.  Simon may indeed be drawing a heretofore unseen picture of Grace, and it is a soft and sensual one that she reveals to him.  While Grace is not well educated, she has learned from watching others to be a lady, and is mentally quick and questioning.  This scene however seems to open her up to sexual feelings that she has not allowed herself in many years, nor barely scratched the surface of prior to imprisonment.

But underneath that is another feeling, a feeling of being wide-eyed awake and watchful.  It’s like being wakened suddenly in the middle of the night, by a hand over your face, and you sit up with your heart going fast, and no one is there.  And underneath that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach; and not even torn open, but too ripe and splitting open of its own accord.

And inside the peach there’s a stone.  (p. 69)

This is likely Grace’s fear of being analyzed yet again, her fear and mistrust of others bordering on paranoia as "no one is there."  She feels herself perhaps as vulnerable as a peach, although I find it inconsistent with the hard skinned self she has presented all these years.  The time has come when she is ready to seek understanding ("but too ripe and splitting open of its own accord") but there is still either another layer to penetrate that is well protected, or she knows the reality of the inner Grace and sees it as — a stone.

Atwood’s incredible writing has always been a revelation and joy to read, and as in the style of Cormac McCarthy, does not allow the reading to be held back by quotation marks in dialogue.  But as a semicolon myself, it was a delight to count the two within a single sentence in the paragraph quoted.

Okay, so I guess I must already retract my musings and admit to being a "poor" close reader:  On page 59, the doctor Simon Jordan is looking at the same portraits I mentioned seeing on page 10, and reading underneath which is clearly written:  Grace Marks, alias Mary Whitney.

But where have I lost my discipline in remaining attuned to all words, phrases, meanings?  Was I thrown back to my Golden Book days of the visual upon seeing the line drawings, awaiting my father’s voice to confirm or supply a new story to go along with the image? 

Maybe I have become a text person, despite the new media training to look at all.  In a recent reading by Steve Ersinghaus of his flashfictional "Stoning Field,"  I realized that I was reading the screen along with him, thinking only that my tendency was due to my editing nature when with the sound of both film audio and human voice along with graphical images I should have been involved in the event of it rather than still concentrating on the written words.

But here, perhaps, a reason why I love written words:

Dora is stout and pudding-faced, with a small downturned mouth like that of a disappointed baby.  Her large black eyebrows meet over her nose, giving her a permanent scowl that expresses a sense of disapproving outrage. (…)  He has tried imagining her as a prostitute–he often plays this private mental game with various women he encounters–but he can’t picture any man actually paying for her services.  It would be like paying to be run over by a wagon, and would be, like that experience, a distinct threat to the health.  Dora is a hefty creature, and could snap a man’s spine in two with her thighs, which Simon envisions as greyish, like boiled sausages, and stubbled like a singed turkey; and enormous, each one as large as a piglet.  (p. 57)

Well now, we certainly have a picture of Dora, the serving woman who works at the house where Simon is renting a room.  Instead of merely describing Dora, Atwood uses the third person omniscient narrative voice (switching from the first person in the beginning of the story from Grace’s pov) to draw her in Simon’s head.  It does make it more interesting, as well as adding some information about Simon himself, and how he thinks, without telling us anything but what he is thinking.  If the POV remains in both first person from Grace, and third omniscient focused (maybe it will turn out to be limited) on Simon, then we will have to decide which, if either or both, to believe and trust, since it appears that Atwood is setting us up for this conflict between the two.  Nicely done.

Perhaps because I just finished Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist I find this comparison with Atwood’s Alias Grace:  the opening is in the present, getting us immediately involved in the characters.  Both writers use as their next step a device to quickly provide the necessary details of story; in The Body Artist  DeLillo provides us with a newspaper obituary that includes background, then proceeds in linear narrative.  In Alias Grace, Atwood uses two devices; a newspaper-like account of the past murders, and a poem that reveals the sequence of events of that past.  She then proceeds back to the linear present (so far). 

Very skillful use of these devices to give the reader information in a straightforward, condensed manner that goes outside of the normal storytelling technique.

I’m pleasantly surprised by this novel, realized that I’m reading it much faster than Marquez’s Solitude which I thoroughly enjoyed plodding through even though it stopped me every other page with fascinating writing, metaphors and concepts.  And faster than DeLillo’s miniscule The Body Artist which stopped me with its vague details to attempt to discover a meaning that may or may not have been there. 

Being a murder mystery and based upon a real case in Canada in 1843, the book naturally has the appeal of story, but Margaret Atwood doesn’t handle anything just as is.  She creates more just by her manipulation of time elements and the hints I’ve grown used to from her short stories.  You learn to listen closely when Atwood speaks, and you get used to the nuances of the language she uses, chooses specifically to achieve the effect she wants the reader to catch and question.

While I’m sure I’ll come to various conclusions as I read along, I’m wondering about the choice of title:  Alias Grace.  While we have no reason to believe so far that Grace used other names, we question whether she uses another if not many sides of herself.  I have a feeling that Atwood will offer us a character loaded with personality to discover for ourselves, and just as there was opinion at the time that ranged from innocent child to psychotic murderess, we’ll have a chance to explore our own perceptions based on Atwood’s fascinating manner of presentation.

Just thirty pages in and struck by Atwood’s manipulation of story, one based on a murder purportedly committed by then sixteen year-old Grace Marks of her employer Mr. Kinnear and his housekeeper/mistress Nancy Montgomery.  Magic in the opening lines:

Out of the gravel there are peonies growing.  They come up through the loose grey pebbles, their buds testing the air like snails’ eyes, then swelling and opening, huge dark-red flowers all shining and glossy like satin.  Then they burst and fall to the ground. (p. 5)

Already we have the image, beauty and tender life pushing through hard gravel.  The temporary finding a place to poke through the forever.  Color and life doomed to death.  Great way of putting it.

Atwood gives us this opening statement from Grace herself, now twenty-four years old and resident of the penitentiary, working at the governor/warden’s home, revealing why she is there.  That’s the background from the protagonist’s point of view as well as an almost admitted sense of regret:

(…) this time it will all be different, this time I will run to help, I will lift her up and wipe away the blood with my skirt, I will tear a bandage from my petticoat and none of it will have had happened.  (p. 6)

Atwood covers much ground in the next few pages, using various techniques to tell the story.  She follows with a very brief scene of the execution of James McDermot, Grace’s partner in the crime, and a short list of prison rules and punishment.   A page of line drawings of the defendents, and then, a poem:

Grace Marks she was a serving maid,
Her age was sixteen years,
McDermtt was the stable hand,
They worked at Thomas Kinnear’s.  (p. 11)

The poem is obviously not great poetry, but it is written in the narrative style of the time, and tells the story through to the hope of Grace’s repentence.  What a clever way to give us the details quickly through the use of this form.

In the next chapter we hear from Grace of her present situation, that of day maid at the prison governor’s house, and we learn from her some of what the governor’s wife’s days are like, her friends, and brilliantly interwoven in this are glimpses of Grace’s possible self.  From a note she finds signed "Nancy" her thoughts return to Nancy Montgomery:

(…) and I must say the first time I saw that, it gave me a fright, although of ourse it was a different Nancy.  Still, the rotten bones.  They would be, by now.  Her face was all black by the time they found her, there must have been a dreadful smell.  It was so hot then, it was July, still she went off surprisingly soon, you’d think she would have kept longer in the dairy, it is usually cool down there.  I am certainly glad I was not present, as it would have been very distressing.  (p. 27)

I like this lady, Grace.  She’s cool, practical.  And, with the visit of a doctor to the house for the purpose of measuring Grace’s head to study the criminal mind, Atwood gives us an intrigueing hint of Grace’s past:

And then I see his hand, a hand like a glove, a glove stuffed with raw meat (…) and I know I have seen a hand like that before (…) Because it’s the same doctor, the same one, the very same black-coated doctor with his bagful of shining knives.  (p. 29)

It looks like Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace has won out; a scan of the back cover that offers murder and mystery, coupled with my own liking of Atwood’s short stories, and that it has had such rave reviews from anyone who has read it made up my mind.

The bad news is that it is another four hundred-plus pager, so it’s going to take up quite a bit of my time.  I don’t think it will require the indepth study such as those by McCarthy or Marquez, so I shall try not to make it an every day blow-by-blow description review, but rather post as I’m taken by the writing which is a sure bet with an Atwood piece.

I’m looking forward to this adventure in reading of both story and author.  My immediate problem however is that for some strange reason I have been referring to it as A-LI-as Grace, rather than A-lias.  Good thing I don’t use an audio weblog.

Just a few posts ago I spoke of odd coincidences. Today, another: Shortly after receiving an e-mail from a fellow Narrativer asking my horoscope sign, I picked up the mail and thumbed through the Writer’s Digest after happily seeing Margaret Atwood on the cover and an interview inside. More on Atwood in a second, but this was her closing statement: “You have to understand my Western horoscope sign is the scorpion, and we’re happiest in the toes of shoes where it’s very dark. Nobody knows we’re there.” I have great admiration for Atwood’s writing, but I too, am a daughter of Scorpio.

The interview was filled with insightful information as to how one author works, and two things in particular stand out:

Q. So how does a … novel come to be? Do you start with a plot concept? The characters?

A. Yes, It’s like overhearing someone talking in the next room. It’s like seeing a village a long way off and thinking you have to go there. It’s like seeing an object fraught with significance. You wonder why it’s there. What is that bloodstained cleaver doing in the middle of the living room floor? I think we’d better look into this! I’m compelled by something to go and find out more about it. And I’ve been wrong.
And this, on Writing and Immortality:

“All writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality–by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.” (Excerpt from her book, Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing.)

More on the interview can be found at Writer’s Digest, and I’ve already added her book, “A Writer on Writing” to my list of wannas.