*Be warned:
Spoilers, spoilers, and more spoilers lay ahead, so don’t read on if you haven’t
read the book—and you should read the
book, because it is awesome: beautifully written with a striking narrator who
unravels a compelling tale. Go read it
and then return, read what I have to say, and then tell me all about your own
thoughts.*
*Second
warning: this book deserves a much more elegantly written and rigorously
considered review than what follows. It
is the week after the 2016 election that I write this and my mental acuity is
not at its height.*
This is the
first book by Margaret Atwood that I have read, and now I’m wondering why I’ve
been wasting years as a literate adult not reading more by her. The Blind Assassin was one of those
books that I knew I was going to love from the first page. Her writing is a wonderful combination of
directness and poetry, intellect and insight without any pomposity. Her language is beautiful even when her subject
isn’t. Her narrator that is rich and
unique. Iris Chase Griffen is an ornery
and sharp-witted woman who is struggling against her physical body’s betrayal and
against the nasty turns of fate that time has thrown at her. She is likeable and humorous and cruel and
pitiable. Atwood’s other characters are
all so beautifully drawn that the world of The Blind Assassin pulses
with life, even as the narrator’s own pulse slows.
Structure
and story in this novel are every bit as brilliant as character and writing. Atwood weaves a narrative through a variety
of literary forms in this book. Through
memoir, fiction, news reports, letters, and more, the strands of Iris’s and
Laura’s lives come together and separate and return again so beautifully that I
found myself wanting to linger in its pages and remember it in the same way
that you sometimes stop to try to commit to memory the details of a
particularly striking sunset. I loved
the alternating of “fact” and “fiction”—I use the quotes because of course the “memoir”
is itself fiction and the fictional novel within the novel is really biographical
for the fictitious author—to connect the past and present and to reveal to the
reader the truths buried under the rubble of lies.
This is,
above all else, a story about women.
First it’s a story about Laura and Iris, and even when the narrative
seems to be more about Iris, Laura is always present. As Iris writes at the end, “Laura was my left
hand, and I was hers. We wrote the book
together. It’s a left-handed book. That’s why one of us is always out of sight,
whichever way you look at it.” It’s also
a story about Iris and her descendants, namely Sabrina, her granddaughter to
whom she finally decides she is writing.
Having lost her daughter, Iris wants to be able to tell Sabrina who she
is by laying out the entirety of their past.
Iris imagines that Sabrina is standoffish and brash and dresses in
black, a rebel in the way teenage girls can be.
Sabrina has been traveling the world, presumably a lived metaphor for
trying to find herself, and Iris, through this book, wants to tell Sabrina who
she is. But the past can be a prison,
and Iris wants any sense of identity gained from it to be freeing to
Sabrina. That is the gift that Alex
Thomas brings to the narrative: “Your real grandfather was Alex Thomas, and as
to who his own father was, well, the sky’s the limit. . . . Your legacy from
him is the realm of infinite speculation.
You’re free to reinvent yourself at will.” Iris wants the information she gives to be
simultaneously defining and non-confining.
There are
only four men of any consequence in the novel, and one of them is Myra’s
husband who does little more than drive Iris about town, mend her broken home,
and occasionally keep her company. The
other three, while exerting great influence at particular parts of the
narrative, all fail to keep their power for the entirety of the novel. Alex Thomas comes closest to having a lasting
influence, being the man that both sisters loved. I found Alex to be a fascinating character
insofar as he was something of an ass as characterized in the novel within the
novel. He treated the female heroine
rather crappily, dismissing her, laughing at her, talking down to her, chiding
her, and deriding her. He is no romantic
hero, and no one reading the novel will walk away with an idolized image of him
as a lover or a companion. But Atwood
handles his portrayal so deftly that we never criticize (at least not for long)
the heroine for being with him. She is
using him as much as he is using her, and while there is genuine affection between
them, no one suffers from the delusion that this is a story of true love. He is powerful and powerless at the same
time, mean but desperate, manly and childish.
And as our understanding of who the heroine is changes—as we move from
seeing Laura as the unnamed woman to seeing Iris instead—the very nature of the
man and the woman’s relationship alters before our eyes. The whole relationship is masterfully crafted
and a marvel to read.
I will point
to one other thing that I love: the way Atwood juggles genres and narrative
conventions in The Blind Assassin.
We obviously have the science fiction tale of the Zycronians that the
man tells the woman, and then there is the romance novel within which that tale
of science fiction is told. Then, within
the larger narrative of the novel, we learn of Iris’s and Laura’s childhood,
which follows the conventions of the gothic romance novel. The girls are locked away in the old manor,
kept apart from the rabble, their father disappearing regularly into the upper
tower for seclusion. There are secrets
behind the doors sealed off to the young girls, and they lose their mother early
in life. Then Iris marries a mysterious and
controlling man with wicked plans and a domineering sister. The entire sequence of their honeymoon, as
she is treated like a child, kept in the dark about her father’s state, and
controlled by her husband and sister-in-law, was heartbreaking and as
tragic-feeling as anything in Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. Atwood takes these conventions and places
them in a modern context to load them full of additional meaning. By leaning on those conventions, she presents
Richard is the real-life version of Rochester, a domineering man who cannot
brook opposition. Instead of a mad-woman
in an attic, he stalks Laura and then declares both Laura and Iris mad to hide
his actions from public. The brilliant
stroke here is that this tale is told from the viewpoint of our heroine as a cantankerous
old woman who sees the villain for what he really is, a pathetic, vain,
predator. We get our tragedy and a sense
of perspective too. In a lot of ways, it
is jarring to move from the 1930s and 1940s to 1998. She could easily have created a simple frame
for the novel, beginning and ending in 1998 and throwing us into the past for
the whole of the middle, but instead we are in a constant state of submersion
and surfacing. Atwood uses that jolt to
keep the past in perspective.
I really
enjoyed this book, and I’m in awe of the way Atwood handles her characters, her
storylines, and her language.
I will leave
you with a few questions.
What is the significance
of Iris’s fascination with the scrawling on the bathroom walls? Is it the anonymity of authorship? The way that voices are layered upon each
other making comment upon comment, cultural reference upon cultural
reference?
What is the
significance of the prominence of the Red Scare in the story? A lot of the backdrop is the world of
factories and labor and work, not to mention war, all traditionally masculine
settings. Is this to keep the girls out
or a commentary on male spaces? Is it
important how the women fare in these traditionally male spaces in the novel?
There are a lot
of suicides in the novel—why? Similarly,
infidelity seems to be a recurring plot point.
Is that relevant?
How is the
relationship between Richard and Winifred a foil for the relationship between
Laura and Iris?
What do you
make of the recurring references to “another dimension”?
I’d love to hear your thoughts and analyses!
I’d love to hear your thoughts and analyses!
