Book Review: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996)

In this quietly unsettling psychological thriller, Margaret Atwood blurs the line between sanity and lunacy—and, above all, challenges the assumption that the two are mutually exclusive. You are challenged, starting immediately, to cast your lot with the word of one or the other: the convicted murderess, Grace Marks, or the legal articles, crime reports, and eyewitness testimony of the townspeople. You are handed multiple materials concerning the setting and details of the July 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery. In other words, Alias Grace gives you everything you need to decide for yourself which person is the lunatic—and therefore guilty.

Grace’s story as a maid begins in an unnamed rural town in Ontario, Canada. From an abusive father to lustful masters, Grace develops an intense aversion toward men and a radically sexualized perception of herself as a woman. She calmly relates all this to Dr. Simon Jordan during their sessions together. Dr. Jordan acts as the eyes of the reader and then some: freshly out of medical school, he is a curious newcomer to the Kinnear murder case, but he is also a doctor seeking to establish an asylum for the mentally unsound and therefore personally invested in Grace’s case.

In Grace’s tale, told in fragments interspersed with events unfolding in present-day Toronto, we see governors, church-goers, and virtuous intellectuals tell lies, distort reality, and altogether manipulate and fabricate webs of fantasy that can appear incredibly convincing to the right people at the right time. And throughout the entire story, something feels eerily amiss—there’s an unshakeable feeling that we are not being told the full truth, either, but a deliberately selective version of it. It’s like seeing an object in a corner of a room, veiled from sight, and knowing it will not be revealed. This object is the human psyche; something we have all learned to cunningly conceal parts of. “If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged,” Grace quietly tells Dr. Jordan at one point.

Emotionally probing and haunting, Alias Grace challenges the human tendency to automatically believe what we are told—the tendency to assume that those who appear sane and honest are actually that, even when other lives hang in the balance. Like many of Atwood’s thrillers, Alias Grace raises numerous questions and leaves them unanswered. Rather than disappointed, however, the reader is left in a daze instead, wondering what kinds of psychological manipulation their own mind might be capable of, awash with a curiously haunting aftertaste.