There are some writers who are so thoroughly dependable that a new text becomes requisite reading regardless of reviews and recommendations. The poet and novelist, Margaret Atwood, falls into this category for me.
Part of her enduring appeal is her refusal to conform her writing to a single genre. It would not be too outrageous to describe her as something of a shape shifter. Winner of numerous awards, her range extends from the modern classic (a slippery genre if ever there was one) to science fiction and back to historical narrative.
The Blind Assassin is her tenth novel. After being shortlisted for the Booker prize four times, she has finally won it with this intriguing and absorbing novel. A prodigious work, it weaves three stories together into a single plot.
The narrative begins with a bang or rather a crash.
“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. …Nothing much was left of her but charred smithereens.”
But The Blind Assassin is not really Laura’s story. After leading us towards that conclusion, Atwood sharply focuses the the novel on the narrator, Laura’s older sister, Iris.
Iris is offering an explanation of her life for her estranged granddaughter, Sabrina. At the time of writing she is aged and embittered. It has not be a happy life.
Manipulated into marrying wealthy businessman Richard Griffen at eighteen, Iris reluctantly becomes part of Toronto high society. Charged by her alcoholic father with the care of her younger sister, Iris is railroaded by her overbearing husband and his imperious sister into a confined and shallow existence. In particular, her relationship with Laura comes under their scrutiny and control. Living in a loveless and superficial world renders Iris frustratingly impotent. She is unable to see the tragic trajectory on which she and her sister are headed.
In between Iris’s story are extracts from her sister’s novel, also called “The Blind Assassin” which was published after her death.
Laura’s novel, scandalous in its day, depicts a pair of covert lovers. Their names are never mentioned. She is wealthy, beautiful and unhappy. He is on the run. To keep himself alive, he writes science-fiction pulp literature, his storytelling becoming entwined with their affair.
The key story that unfolds is about a highly class-structured society on a distant planet where the wealthy and powerful exploit the weak, a motif repeated through all the layers of The Blind Assassin.
“The carpets were woven by slaves who were invariably children, because only the fingers of the children would be small enough for such intricate work. But the incessant close labour demanded of these children caused them to go blind by the age of eight or nine, and their blindness was the measure by which the carpet-sellers valued and extolled their merchandise: This carpet blinded ten children, they would say.”
Once the children were blind they were useless as carpet weavers. Abandoned by mainstream society, they became prostitutes or assassins.
Like memory, this memoir is not a linear work. It traverses back and forth in time from the present – where 82-year-old Iris is frail, lonely and dependent – back to her grandparent’s wealth and status in the late 19th century.
The narrative structure is like a set of Russian babushka dolls, each story fits neatly within the other. While the differences are evident, there are also obvious similarities between the plots.
Infused with regret and bitterness, The Blind Assassin is a elegantly composed novel. It depicts happiness as an elusive thing, frustrated by humanity’s incapacity for love and understanding. From Iris’s parent’s marriage to the fictional love affair, every relationship depicted in the novel is fraught with angst and disappointment.
“Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself, through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and snuffles, romance only sighs. Does she want more than that – more of him? Does she want the whole picture?”
Replete with yearning but also cynicism, this novel does not offer much in the way of hope. There’s a sad sourness to the tone. Men and women are incapable of helping each other but there is no solace to be found in the divine either – religion is trick wrought on the unsuspecting and the kind. Iris and Laura’s parents were once people of great faith in God. Separated soon after their marriage by World War One, their mother became more fervent in her belief, while their father lost his completely.
“Over the trenches God had burst like a balloon, and there was nothing left of him but grubby little scraps of hypocrisy. Religion was just a stick to beat the soldiers with, and anyone who declared otherwise was full of pious drivel. … All the talk of fighting for God and Civilization made him vomit.”
A rare species of fiction, The Blind Assassin is at once a page-turner (you won’t be able to put it down) and a fabulously written piece of literature. It is easily one of the richest, most engaging - if ultimately tragic - novels published this year.
