Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Format: Kindle
Read: February 2025

This is the first one in my backlog of reviews from February! If I had more time I’d have liked to do a more in-depth analysis of this one, it definitely deserves it, but I don’t so I’ll just have to settle for squeezing out whatever scattered thoughts are still in my head!

I have to say I struggled with it at first, it took some time to get going. I didn’t have a good time from Simon’s point of view. While young and handsome, with a genuine interest in mental diseases, he is also disturbingly misogynistic and objectifies every woman he comes across, with increasingly violent fantasies. This is of course the point, and it reminded me a lot of reading All That Man Is by David Szalay for book club when I learned – depressingly – that this is how men think. His behaviour only gets worse as the novel goes on, and it’s just so classic that he has his Mummy cleaning up his mess by the end of things!

For those that may not know, Grace Marks was a real person as was James McDermott, and there seems to be no doubt that he did murder their employers Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery. What is unclear is the part that Grace played in these crimes – was she involved or did McDermott force her to flee with him? This doubt, and public perceptions of Grace, are what Atwood explores in this novel. As a pretty young girl, she attracted a lot of attention in the media, inspiring many salacious theories wanting to either cast her as an innocent or a manipulative jezebel. Simon is no exception to this, as much as he may go in with professional scientific intention he soon finds his thoughts become clouded by his own projections.

Grace takes a while to truly enter the picture and start telling her story in her own words. You know I love an unreliable narrator, so I had a great time with Grace! She’s telling the story to Simon, who she knows has been employed to help get her released from prison, so we cannot believe everything she says. And even if she tells her story in good faith, we can’t trust her memory for events thirty years ago and of which she’s on record having told conflicting accounts.

The novel leaves the story as open as history does on what the relationship was between Grace and McDermott, and whether or not she had a hand in the murders, which I believe is the only way you can responsibily tell a story like this. It’s up to the reader to decide how much reading between the lines they want to do!

I really enjoyed Alias Grace once it got going, and it became clearer as to what Atwood’s intentions were. Neither Grace nor Simon are likeable but they are interesting characters, frustrating in different ways. There are also interesting explorations of gender and misogyny, class, the media, truth and memory. I wish I had the time at the moment to do this book justice!