46
PARTISAN REVIEW
achievement of the imagination, a re- invention of fact of such hallucina–
tory vividness that one would suppose the wri ter had wi tnessed every
moment of the true history of the 1840s upon which it is based. Before
any other appeal the story this novel relates has the appeal of a mystery
still unsolved which had its contrary interpreters in its own time. Crace
Marks was a sixteen-year-old serving girl who was sentenced to life
imprisonment for her part in the murder of her employer, a Canadian
landowner named Thomas Kinnear; her supposed accomplice, James
McDermott, also a servant of Kinnear's, was hanged for this murder as well
as for the murder of Kinnear's housekeeper and mistress, Nancy
Montgomery. The particular gruesomeness of the murders, and the suspi–
cion of an erotic snake's nest in which Crace was in love with Kinnear
while McDermott
and
his employer had been making love to both
women, aroused the lubricity of contemporary newspaper readers. But
Grace's youth and beauty drew defenders; there were those who thought
she might have been quite innocent, a mere witness dragged along by
Montgomery in his night across the border. She herself had confessed her
guil t but later claimed that she could not remember taking direct part in
the murders; she was at one point deemed insane and at another sane and
responsible.
Atwood has structured her novel as detective fiction and invented a
fictional detective-investigator who, some years later, burrows for the
truth. He is a young Boston doctor, a specialist in the infant field of psy–
chology who claims to be interested not so much in the determination of
guil t as in the phenomenon of memory, particularly what Freud would
later call buried memory. By patiently and repeatedly interviewing the
twenty-three-year-old Grace at the Kingston penitentiary, Simon Jordan
hopes to bring her to the point of recalling the horrific moments that lie
deep in her mind.
Simon has his own adventure in Kingston - a sexual liaison with his
landlady from which he struggles to escape as he returns again and again,
with passionate attentiveness and growing love, to his interviews with
Grace. His method is to begin at the beginning with her earliest recollec–
tions and lead her gently forward to later scenes. These confessions which
never confess what the listener is most curious to hear make up the bulk
of Atwood's pages. They constitute a narrative of exquisite clarity and
unconscious eloquence replete with details and shrewd wit - the narrative
of a kind of life seldom recorded, that of the humblest of working women
of a past time. Out of
hislory~
buried memory Atwood brings forth a mar–
velous evocation of the child Crace, one of nine in an impoverished Irish
family that emigrated to Canada, the miseries of the voyage, the exact con–
ditions of daily life after they arrived, and the commencement of her
