Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
... it's tempting to suggest that the entire book served no real purpose. There are no valid/useful conclusions we can draw from a fictionalised version of the events, but equally the author has been constrained in what she can say through the characters because she has tried to remain bound by the real events. There was nowhere she could go with this, and so it went nowhere.
That is a bit harsh and unfair ... probably. But I do wish she had picked one side of the fence or the other - fiction or non-fiction. The compromise, while it seemed well executed to me, was never going to be satisfying.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum
If you take this to its logical extreme, does any work of fiction serve a real purpose? (I'm considering this book to be fiction because that's what it is, though based on facts, rather than being a biography of Grace Marks.) For me, a work of fiction that isn't light-hearted fluff purely for entertainment, is an examination of the human condition.
I think it is reasonable to say that Atwood took the bare known facts and imagined a scenario that wasn't too far-fetched where Grace might or might not have been an active participant in one or both murders. She considered why Grace might have acted as she did if she was innocent of committing the murders, and I think the scenario is plausible. She was young, she was afraid, she couldn't see what to do to stop McDermott, and so on.
But Atwood also wrote in a way that we simply do not know for certain whether Grace was innocent or guilty, and I rather liked that.
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I agree with Bookpossum. We can't ever know all there is to know about any actual events; fictionalizing them is a way to provide a possible interpretation, and it's one reason that I often tend to prefer a fictionalized account--I want a plausible explanation and I want to understand how things might have happened. No one's ever going to know for sure if Grace was a murderer; why should there be certainty about Atwood's fictional creation? I didn't really want some last-minute confession from Grace if she was guilty, and if she was innocent, well, that's what she'd been saying all along.
I've read a few novels based on actual murders, and whether names are changed or not, the more I know about the actual case, the less tolerant I am of an author's interpretation that disregards the apparent facts--and my own existing prejudices (e.g.,
Little Deaths, based on the Alice Crimmins case). Of course, the most famous did-she-or-didn't-she is probably Lizzie Borden. No matter how many novels I read about her (e.g.,
See What I Have Done), and no matter if the author comes down on the side of guilt or innocence, who knows?
It's the WHY that's most important, whether it's why someone committed a murder or why someone was falsely accused of that murder. I think that's what Atwood explores here, though there are no easy answers.