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TIFF: At the world premiere of the upcoming CBC/Netflix miniseries, Atwood and showrunner Sarah Polley explained why no narrator can be trusted.

For someone who has established such an illustrious and prolific career from crafting stories rife with nuanced themes of identity, gender, and complacency, Margaret Atwood has a fairly disenchanted view of narrators. Namely, she believes that none of them should be taken at face value.

"I don't think anyone is a reliable narrator - in real life or anywhere else," she told audiences Thursday night at the TIFF world premiere of " Alias Grace." "Who tells the absolute truth all the time? There was a movie made where people were cursed with having to tell the absolute truth all the time and the result was... not pretty."

The upcoming six-part miniseries from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation and Netflix is based on Atwood's novel of the same name, and is a pet project from producer and actress Sarah Polley, who started trying to option the rights when she was just 17 years old. Polley wrote all six episodes, which were directed by Mary Harron; Toronto-born Sarah Gadon ("11.22.63") and Edward Holcroft ("Wolf Hall") star.

Indeed, the reliance of narration is a central theme to the 1996 source material, which tracks the story of real-life "murderess" Grace Marks (Gadon) as she sits down to tell her story to fictional alienist Dr. Simon Jordan (Holcroft), hired by those campaigning for her release. The 16-year-old Irish-Canadian immigrant and maid was convicted in 1843 alongside servant James McDermott (Kerr Logan) for the murders of Capt. Thomas Kinnear (Paul Gross) and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery (Anna Paquin), who was also rumored to be his mistress and pregnant with her second child at the time of her death.

While McDermott was hanged for his part in the crimes, Marks was sentenced to death but then later shown mercy with a life sentence at Ontario's Kingston Penitentiary (former home to convicted serial killer Paul Bernardo) instead. She was released nearly 40 years later, fled to New York under the alias Mary Whitney and disappeared from the history books altogether.

Not that what was recorded there was exactly accurate.

As most high-profile cases of murder tend to be (and as the current climate for true-life crime stories on television continues to dictate), Marks' story was highly recorded and recounted, with those arguing for her innocence and guilt coming out in droves. It was an era in Canadian history where casual visitors to the jail could be taken to see the supposed killer like a caged animal in a zoo, and there was an additional fascination (and often mistreatment) towards women who apparently defied human nature by performing evil acts. With everyone but Marks speaking for her and about her, little is known of what actually happened on that fateful summer day in 1843. That's precisely why Atwood wanted to tackle the story in the first place, and why she threw herself into researching and writing a narrative that winds all of Marks' stories together.

"There were so many different, contradictory stories about Grace Marks; nobody actually ever knew whether she had killed anybody or not. There were four people in the house. Two of them were murdered, the third one was hanged and she was the one left. And she never told," Atwood said following the screening of the first two episodes. "If I had known the truth, I probably wouldn't have written a book. And if I had known the truth and told it to Sarah [Polley], she probably wouldn't have made this show. The interesting thing is the way everybody projects their ideas onto Grace. The fact that she had various stories that she told to different audiences... well, that always affects the story that you tell - who the audience is. Does it not?"

That fascination is in part what drove nearly 1,000 TIFF-goers to the Winter Garden Theatre for the premiere Thursday night, packing the house in what is perhaps appropriately known to be the last double-decker Edwardian Theatre facility in the world - one that's said, by the employees who work there, to be haunted. (The venue also happens to house the seat another famed criminal, John Dillinger, famously occupied at Chicago's Biograph Theater right before he was killed by law enforcement outside; the seat was unknowingly purchased and refurbished as part of the Winter Garden Theatre's restoration in the 1980s.)

Canadians' ongoing fascination with Atwood, especially on the heels of Hulu's Emmy-nominated adaptation of "The Handmaid's Tale" was another clear reason for the packed crowd; the air was palpable when Atwood took the stage alongside the other creatives and cast. Fittingly for such a Canadian premiere, Ontario's Minister of Tourism, Culture and Sport Eleanor McMahon was also in the house, while Minister of Canadian Heritage Melanie Joly made introductions on behalf of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In fact, add in an on-screen cameo by David Cronenberg and a cast rounded out by the likes of Anna Paquin and Paul Gross, and it was a Canadian celebration all-around. Few other projects that have been a part of TIFF's three-year-old Primetime program have boasted such clout, or had to turn away eager crowds at $59 CAN per general admission ticket.

Atwood, audiences, and eager viewers aren't the only ones obsessed with Marks' story, though. Her portrayer in "Alias Grace," Sarah Gadon, didn't just have to work hard at her Irish accent and do most of the heavy lifting in nearly ever scene in order to capture the woman whose story remains ambiguous to this day. She's also inadvertently become the poster child for Marks' story (her photo appears on the historical figure's Wikipedia page, for instance), and is feeling the pressure heading into the Sept. 25 CBC premiere (the episodes drop globally Nov. 3 on Netflix).

"Everyone gets seduced by the idea of trying to crack Grace. I would get so wrapped up in that in prep that I would have to just suddenly go for a run because I physically needed to find a way through it," she said. "What really helped in finding the character was deciding to do different versions of her. I play her from about 15-years-old onwards, so it was pretty epic... I'm so haunted by her."

Now that's a narrative worth telling.

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Margaret Atwood on 'Alias Grace': 'If I Had Known the Truth, I Wouldn't Have Written a Book'

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TIFF: At the world premiere of the upcoming CBC/Netflix miniseries, Atwood and showrunner Sarah Polley explained why no narrator can be trusted. For someone who has established such an illustrious and prolific career from crafting stories rife with nuanced themes of identity, gender, and complacency, Margaret Atwood has a fairly disenchanted view of narrators.

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Lots of good pointers here.

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Spoilers ahead for the book and the series.
Netflix's new Margaret Atwood adaptation Alias Grace is remarkably faithful to Atwood's original novel. It's not just a representation of the novel's plot and characters, although it certainly does that. More impressive, as a TV series Alias Grace hews closely to the structure and tone of the book, which is no simple feat for a book as knotty and intricate as this one. The series is close enough to its source text that several passages come directly from Atwood's original language. More important, Sarah Polley's adaptation is remarkably effective at translating the form of Atwood's novel into a visual language. That form is vital to Alias Grace, and it would've been so easy to lose in the adaptation.

It's a massive novel, though - inevitably, some things have been trimmed in order to cut the 450-page tome into a six-part mini-series. It's also a stubbornly textual work of fiction. While Polley's series is amazingly good at re-creating much of Atwood's narrative world, some of the Alias Grace project gets stuck on the page and can't quite make it to the screen.

Here are some of the ways Sarah Polley's Alias Grace draws from its source text, and a few of the things that got left behind.

The voice-over and the narrators
Like Hulu's adaptation of Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, voice-over plays a crucial role in Polley's Alias Grace. It's fundamental (and perhaps unavoidable) for both series because Atwood's novels are so intent on representing the gap between exteriors and interiors. One of the central questions of Alias Grace is that of Grace Marks's innocence or guilt, and Dr. Jordan's inability to figure it out. He can rely only on what he sees in Grace's face and what she's willing to tell him, and can only guess what's happening inside her head. Atwood's novel represents this conundrum by splitting into different narrators - some portions are narrated by Grace herself, while other parts of the story are told by a third-person narrator who gazes down on Dr. Jordan. For the series, Grace's voice-over allows us to understand the contradictions between what she says aloud to Dr. Jordan and the thoughts actually running through her head.

The series can't quite re-create the distance between Atwood's first-person and third-person narrative voices though - while we're trained to feel a sharp difference between first-person and third-person narrators as readers, we're less familiar with thinking of the camera as a type of omniscient narrator. Still, the series is adept atcapitalizing on the underlying effect: Grace, in her role as an unnerving, unknowable raconteur, weaves a story for Dr. Jordan while also doing the same for us. She speaks to the viewer directly, and knows full well that she's entertaining us. Dr. Jordan, meanwhile, is only seen from a remove. Much though he'd like it, he has no control over the story being told.

Quilting
The quilt is one of Atwood's dominant metaphors in Alias Grace. It's literally representative of the minute, obsessively neat needlework Grace spends her life doing, and the various quilting patterns all hold thematic weight within the story. The quilts are images from the Biblical story of Eve, or are meant to represent the home - the parallels to Grace's story are pretty obvious. But more broadly, Atwood's novel is constructed like a quilt. Grace's story is built out of pieces, each of them snippets from completely unrelated things, sewn together to create a new image. In the novel, those pieces are different narrative voices - we get Grace's point of view, the narrator who tells us about Dr. Jordan, letters the characters send to one another, snippets of newspapers, song lyrics, book excerpts, court records, and bits of other literature.

In the Netflix series, the piecemeal, mosaic structure that's so important to Atwood's text becomes snippets of scenes, intercut with one another in startling ways. Dr. Jordan holds up an apple and we see a brief startling clip of an apple peel falling onto the floor, long before we know where that scene actually fits into the story. As Grace tells Dr. Jordan her life story leading up to the murders, brief shocking frames from the crime interrupt her story. We see some of those images many times over the course of the series. Like a quilt, there are patterns and familiar repeating shapes. Like a quilt, it's hard to grasp the whole image without stepping back and trying to put all the pieces into one coherent design.

The historical Grace Marks
One thing Atwood makes clear that Polley does not: Grace Marks was a real woman, who was really convicted of murdering her employer Thomas Kinnear and his pregnant housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. The historical facts of the case are an important part of Atwood's quilt, providing more pieces in the puzzle of Grace's guilt or innocence - fiction and fact are all sewn together. The Netflix series presents exactly the same facts and suppositions and fictionalizations as Atwood's novel, but the historical basis for it all remains hidden.

Dr. Jordan
While there are few significant plot changes between the book and the series, Dr. Jordan has a much bigger role within Atwood's novel. We get more of his experience outside of Grace's narrative, more of his correspondence with other experts trying to understand her case, and generally more of his confusion and frustration with himself - he's drawn to Grace and repulsed by her and wants to protect her and doesn't know if he wants her to be innocent. It's not that the Dr. Jordan character on the screen is an inaccurate version of the novel's Dr. Jordan, it's just that Atwood's story gives him much more space to be a mess. The Atwood novel also spends much more time on his relationship with his landlady.

Mrs. Humphrey
Ah yes, Dr. Jordan's landlady. As with Dr. Jordan, it's not that the series misrepresents or dramatically changes what we know about Mrs. Humphrey from Atwood's text. It's that we get much less of it. The short and unhappy relationship between the two in Polley's series is a much more drawn-out affair in the novel. Mrs. Humphrey is more directly, explicitly in pursuit of Dr. Jordan, and Dr. Jordan is even more willing to use her for his own needs. One of the series' biggest departures from the novel is Mrs. Humphrey's final fate. In the series, Dr. Jordan leaves and it's the last we hear of her. Atwood's novel has Dr. Jordan abandon her abruptly after Grace's hypnotism is performed, not just because Grace's case is so upsetting, but because Mrs. Humphrey learns her husband plans to come back.

Atwood's novel makes her fate even more pathetic - the final portions of the novel are letters, many of them from Dr. Jordan's mother to Mrs. Humphrey, requesting she please stop writing to her son. ("To threaten to do yourself an injury, by jumping off a bridge ... might carry weight with an impressionable and tender-hearted young man, but it does not, with his more experienced mother," Mrs. Jordan writes.) The final letter in the series is from Grace to Dr. Jordan - it's a neater and more direct ending. Atwood's novel lets the end be sadder, and messier.

The end
For the most part, Grace's ending in the novel resembles the one in the series. She ends up married to Jamie Walsh, running a farm with a cat named Tabby and a dog named Rex. Some passages of her description of her life with Walsh make it into the series' voice-over script nearly unchanged, especially as they relate to Jamie's morbid interest in Grace's past. Atwood includes one closing detail that Polley omits, however. As she sits considering her life, Grace tells the reader that even though she's 45 and imagined she'd be too old, she now thinks she might be pregnant. "Unless I am much mistaken, I am now three months gone," she says "...but then it might as easily be a tumour." It's one final instance of Atwood's repeating motif in Alias Grace: pregnancy and death woven together in the same thought.

The Netflix series dispenses with this detail; instead, Polley concludes with an image of Grace and a quilt. At the end of the series, we see Grace, speaking to herself, to her alter egos, to Dr. Jordan, and to her viewers, about the fate that awaits them all. "And so," she says, looking at the quilt where she's patched all the pieces into one design, "we will all be together." It's also the last line in the book. Like Grace and her two dead companions, both Alias Grace s end together.

Alias Grace Is Another Gripping Margaret Atwood-Inspired TV Show

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How Does Netflix's Alias Grace Compare to Margaret Atwood's Book?

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Spoilers ahead for the book and the series. Netflix's new Margaret Atwood adaptation Alias Grace is remarkably faithful to Atwood's original novel. It's not just a representation of the novel's plot and characters, although it certainly does that.

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The novel is told in sections that alternate Grace's point of view with a third-person narration closely focused on Simon Jordan. For the most part, the servant girl's hair-raising story unfolds through long interviews, during which the doctor urges her to reflect upon her life. Grace's gloriously commonsensical, observant, often lyrical perspective guides us through her impoverished childhood, her rough trans-Atlantic passage and her tranquil interlude in service among the Toronto bourgeoisie -- all the way to the fateful sojourn at the country house in which Thomas Kinnear lives in sin with Nancy Montgomery.

Much of this is beautifully written and convincingly imagined. Ms. Atwood manages the considerable achievement of finding a voice for Grace -- and a tone for her narrative -- that doesn't seem mannered, anachronistic or archaic. With startling authenticity, she renders, for example, the delirious joy that a fresh red radish or a newly plucked chicken offers a woman who has survived on prison fare. Arguably, the book's great strength lies in its elegant and evocative descriptions of the domestic activities that once commanded the full attention of women from the less privileged classes:

''When we had a wash hanging out and the first drops began to fall, we would rush out with the baskets and gather all in as quickly as we could, and then haul it up the stairs and hang it out anew in the drying room, as it could not be allowed to sit in the baskets for long because of mildew. . . . The shirts and the nightgowns flapping in the breeze on a sunny day were like large white birds, or angels rejoicing, although without any heads. But when we hung the same things up inside, in the gray twilight of the drying room, they looked different, like pale ghosts of themselves hovering and shimmering there in the gloom.''

There's a complex rhythm to much of the cautious pas de deux that Grace and her would-be deliverer dance around each other, and enough plot twists, forebodings and unanswered questions to keep us paging rapidly through the somewhat languorous accounts of daily routines in the prisons and social calls in the drawing rooms of Victorian Canada. Who is the elusive Mary Whitney? What does Jeremiah the peddler know about the murder? How is Grace's recurrent dream of red peonies connected to her buried knowledge of the grisly crime?

Still, it's not until halfway through the book, when Grace recounts her meeting with the irregular Kinnear menage, that the tension escalates and the plot gathers real momentum. After all that parlor politesse and patient probing, it's a relief to find ourselves in a hotbed of seething jealousies and grudges and precipitous departures, in a household plagued by night terrors and urgent whispers in the dark. The heightened gloom and steamy passions rampant at the rural homestead suggest an unlikely collaboration among Daphne du Maurier, Charlotte Bronte and Alice Munro. Suddenly the early part of the novel pales and begins to seem, in retrospect, ever so slightly neurasthenic.

Eventually, we may come to feel that our reservations about the book are partly the result of having seen one too many kindly physician welcome the challenge of mediating between the cruel, rejecting world and an outcast medical (or moral) anomaly in period costume. Think of the doctors in ''The Elephant Man'' or Truffaut's ''Wild Child'' and you will grasp the reflective, civilized tone (if not the content) of Dr. Jordan's researches. (The doctor's turbulent private life does seem to confirm the popular prejudice that the least stable elements of the scientific community are most often drawn to the helping and psychotherapeutic professions.)

Far more problematic is the frequency with which Ms. Atwood succumbs to the seductions of pedagogy. The book provides, in snippets, a crash course in Victorian culture: elementary discourses on the middle class's passion for spiritualism, its quasi-religious faith in progress, its mounting discomfort with the gap between theology and science. (You can almost hear the requisite historical notes being struck, one by one, like bars on a xylophone.) Rather than enhancing the novel's verisimilitude, these mini-lessons underline the distance between reader and subject. A kind of schoolroom lethargy sets in, from which we are occasionally startled by ominous, tantalizing hints about the secrets of Grace's past -- including, at several crucial points, the disheartening suggestion that the key to her amnesia may involve the most faddish of 20th-century psychiatric diagnoses.

Some readers may feel that the novel only intermittently succeeds in transcending the burden of history, research and abstraction -- all that gloomy gaslight, all those creepy shadows. Others will admire the liveliness with which Ms. Atwood toys with both our expectations and the conventions of the Victorian thriller. Such fans will be delighted by the plot's many riddles, its edifying Victoriana, the enigmas that continue to perplex us even after we've finished this latest installment in the mystery of a pretty young woman who was either the loathsome perpetrator or another innocent victim of an infamous crime.

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The novel is told in sections that alternate Grace's point of view with a third-person narration closely focused on Simon Jordan. For the most part, the servant girl's hair-raising story unfolds through long interviews, during which the doctor urges her to reflect upon her life.

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I had just finished reading Headhunter by Timothy Findley (this month's Toronto in Literature Book Club selection) and was still radiating a bit with the strangeness of it all, floating around in that in-between place of being absorbed in the universe of a book and being back in the real world. I turned on the TV to kind of snap myself out of it and TVO's was on. The episode was about Southern Ontario Gothic literature and, lo and behold, as I watched I soon realized that what they were talking about was exactly what I had just been reading.

The term Southern Ontario Gothic first appeared in print in an interview with Timothy Findley, published in Graeme Gibson's Eleven Canadian Novelists. In the interview, Gibson comments that people had been remarking on the influence of American Southern Gothic in Findley's work, to which Findley replies (in a jokingly defensive manner), "sure it's Southern Gothic: Southern Ontario Gothic. And that exists."

Southern Ontario Gothic is a sub-genre of the Gothic literature genre. Gothic literature originated in England in the late 18th Century and became popular with books such as Frankenstein and An important sub-genre of Gothic literature is American Southern Gothic, exemplified by writers such as Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor.

Southern Ontario Gothic marries the ordinary, everyday-ness of literary realism with the horror and terror of the evil that lurks beneath. Its writers share a strong sense of regional place, and they depict and often celebrate the small details of daily life in that place while also exploring the other side of the everyday, what The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature describes as " the merciless forces of Perfectionism, Propriety, Presbyterianism, and Prudence" (emphasis mine):

Traditionally the Gothic deals with confinement, illness, madness, demonism, secrets, live burial, and fear. Usually an imperilled heroine searches for the clues to her identity in a ruin or a confining architectural space like a dungeon. In the Southern Ontario tradition, however, the threat to the female protagonist can come from the wilderness, from cabin fever, or from uncommunicative husbands. (1085)

Writers in the Southern Ontario Gothic tradition typically use elements of the Gothic - repression, desire, trauma, monstrosity, the uncanny, the supernatural - to explore or expose racial, gendered, religious, and political hypocrisies. Interestingly, some of Canada's most canonical writers are often described as working in the Southern Ontario Gothic mode; writers like Margaret Atwood, Jane Urquhart, and Alice Munro.

People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

Here are four Southern Ontario Gothic reads recommended by guests on The Agenda:

You can watch the complete episode on Southern Ontario Gothic below:

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Southern Ontario Gothic: Prudence, Propriety, Perfectionism...and Peril

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I had just finished reading Headhunter by Timothy Findley (this month's Toronto in Literature Book Club selection) and was still radiating a bit with the strangeness of it all, floating around in that in-between place of being absorbed in the universe of a book and being back in the real...