It has been a good television year for Margaret Atwood. In the age of Donald Trump and the #MeToo fightback against sexual assault, the Canadian novelist's works have seemed ever more prescient and ripe for adaptation.
On the back of Hulu's Emmy win for the channel's adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale comes Netflix's six-part series based on Atwood's 1996 novel Alias Grace, written by Canadian actress and director Sarah Polley and directed by fellow Canadian Mary Harron.
Based on the true story of 19th-century Irish housemaid Grace Marks, who was found guilty of murdering a Canadian landowner and his housekeeper, Alias Grace is a mystery that questions the nature of patriarchy and the ways in which it affects the developments of relationships between women in male-dominated society.
It is also, in true Atwood style, a story about the ways we present ourselves to others and the impossibility of arriving at the truth in a society that refuses to acknowledge the lies upon which it functions.
WORKING THE SYSTEM
When the action begins, Grace has served 15 years in prison for the murders and, thanks to the charity of a group of spiritualists who believe her to be innocent, acquired a day job as a maid where she is interviewed by young Dr Simon Jordan (Edward Holcroft), who is a kind of proto-psychologist, asking Grace to recount her story and taking notes in an attempt to come to a decision regarding her mental health.
Played with a mixture of careful diligence and emotional shift by Sarah Gadon, Grace appears to be a dutiful, honest young woman who has done her best to lead a pure, honest life in spite of the difficult hand she's been dealt.
WATCH | The trailer for Alias Grace
As her conversations, recollections and voiceover narration commence over the course of the initial, slow-paced but increasingly intriguing opening episodes, we, like Dr Jordan, become more enamoured and empathetic of her circumstances while simultaneously questioning her recollections.
As the series progresses, its central question moves from whether or not Grace is guilty of the crimes to whether it may be entirely possible that the cases for innocence and guilt are equally plausible.
Under the veneer of Harron's beautifully photographed period settings and sometimes seemingly genial depiction of Victorian-era Canada lies an uneasy world shown in brief flashes of abusive fathers, bodies in basements and gory botched abortions.
When Jordan becomes increasingly doe-eyed in the presence of his patient, Grace sees through him and uses his feelings for her to her advantage. The apparently docile, pretty Irish maid is far more aware of how to work the system and its representatives to her advantage than anyone gives her credit for.
While it shares some narrative and thematic similarities with The Handmaid's Tale - the flashbacks, voiceover, bonnets and contrasting of upstairs/downstairs worlds of women in societies where they have few options - Alias Grace is, rather than a forward imagining of the possible outcomes of current patriarchal attitudes, a depressing revelation of how little has changed for many women over the past 170 years.
DARKER ELEMENTS
On the road towards its morally murky conclusion, Harron and Polley cleverly allow the darker elements of the story to come to the fore and undercut the lyrical, golden-lit parlours of the privileged and their patronising curiosity towards those who work to ensure their comfort.
With an outstanding supporting cast that includes Anna Paquin, Kerr Logan, Zachary Levi and a pleasantly surprising cameo for Canada's master of the uncanny David Cronenberg, the show puts a dark, uneasy spin on the traditions of the period genre that proves that in the right hands, even the most apparently unadaptable of novels can be reworked without losing fidelity to its major concerns and stylistic singularity.
It has been a very good year for Atwood on television and while that's a good thing, it's also an indictment of how little we've managed to change so many of our fundamental social values.
• All six episodes of 'Alias Grace' are currently available to stream on Netflix.
