The Brilliance of The Blind Assassin

*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!