In my head, there is a long list of novels that I love, but feel strongly should never be adapted for the screen. These include: Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf (stream-of-consciousness novels never work); Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (ditto books about talking cats); and Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson (too filthy).
Until yesterday, my list also featured Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood’s 1996 novel about an Irish immigrant servant girl in 1840s Canada who may or may not have murdered her master and mistress and who relates her version of events to a pioneering young psychologist.
It shouldn’t work as TV drama – Atwood weaves a complex postmodern narrative that partly dispenses with historical accuracy in order to say wider things about the role of women throughout history. Grace is an unreliable witness, her version of the truth articulated in a patchwork of complex thoughts.
And yet director Sarah Polley has managed to grasp Atwood’s challenging prose and create something that feels both obsessively faithful and cinematically ambitious. This production (now available in its entirety on Netflix) is literate film-making of the highest order.
Polley has captured the novel’s essential strangeness and also applied rigour to the world of a 19th-century drudge. When you watch Sarah Gadon’s Grace knead dough, you see the perspiration on her brow, the rawness of her over-worked hands.
Indeed, much rests on Gadon’s performance and she delivers to extraordinary effect – she’s watchful, enigmatic and smart at the same time, conveying oceans of meaning in the smallest of glances. “This is for you,” says Dr Simon Jordan (Edward Holcroft), offering Grace an apple. “I am not a dog,” she replies without so much as a flicker of emotion.
Equally good is Rebecca Liddiard as Grace’s friend Mary, flitting effortlessly between chumminess and revolutionary fervour (it’s set just after the 1837 Canadian Rebellions).
As Dr Jordan, Holcroft has a harder job, having to spend much of the time reacting (or more accurately trying not to react) to Grace’s ambiguous narrative, but he rises to the challenge of conveying Jordan’s struggle between professional detachment and emotional fascination.
Alias Grace comes in the wake of another Atwood adaptation – of the dystopian feminist classic The Handmaid’s Tale. I admired rather than enjoyed that series, although I was constantly struck by its incendiary relevance.
You might think that Alias Grace would fall short here, stuck within an exact moment of Canadian history. And yet in its themes of class injustice, the plight of immigrants and male domination, it captures the here and now – precisely because it’s not trying to.