Recalled to Life

A mail coach in the fog, a three-word message, and a man dug out of an eighteen-year grave in the Bastille. Margaret Atwood walks the opening of Dickens's novel with an eye you don't expect: not reverent, forensic. She finds a genuine plot hole at the heart of it, the question of who actually freed Doctor Manette, and offers her own theory of the crime. And she lingers at the wine shop below, where a woman sits knitting. What that knitting is, and how ancient the image behind it turns out to be, becomes the key to the whole novel.