Volume 43, Number 20 · December 19, 1996
Murder and Memory
By Hilary Mantel
Alias Grace
by Margaret Atwood
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 468 pp., $24.95
There are no fewer than five epigraphs by way of introduction; it is understandable that Margaret Atwood should hesitate on the brink, before launching herself into the powerful currents of her latest novel. Her chapter headings take their titles from the names of quilt patterns. This would be a worn and dangerously cosy device, if the names themselves were not so shudderingly evocative. There is peril here: Jagged Edge, Snake Fence. There is woman's fallibility, woman's fate: Broken Dishes, Secret Drawer, Rocky Road. There is destruction: Falling Timbers. And woman's primal guilt: Pandora's Box.
Review, 3482 words
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