If you’re keeping your eye open for something to really validate your hopeless outlook on life and humanity, look no further: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin will shatter your dreams and rip your faith out from under you, be it in love or marriage or goodness or even faith itself. That’s right. It will make you question your faith in faith.
In all seriousness, though, this novel was extraordinarily well written and captivatingly structured, although I think the structure also sort of prevents the book from drawing the reader in right off the bat. The opening line—“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura [Chase] drove a car off a bridge.”—is definitely intriguing, but only three pages are dedicated to elaborating on that statement. After two pages of prose and one newspaper excerpt, the novel turns into another novel, Laura Chase’s The Blind Assassin. In total, Atwood’s novel tells four stories simultaneously, a tactic designed to keep readers on the edge of their seats, but at the same time one that disjoints the fictional worlds a little too much to completely submerse the reader.
Iris Chase, the novel’s protagonist and primary narrator, is writing down her life’s story for a granddaughter she never sees. She’s writing down the truth, she says, which is the only thing she has left to offer. Her narrative blends the present-day Iris—the 83-year old woman who resents the fact that she can’t fend for herself anymore, who dreads the death she feels lurking just around the corner—and the young Iris of the 1920s, the 1930s, growing up in turbulent times with a dysfunctional family. She writes about the Chase family history, about her grandfather’s button factory that got passed down to her father and eventually destroyed her family, about her uptight and proper grandmother, about her unstable and compassionate mother, whose compassion was reserved only for those outside of her own home. She writes about her sister Laura, her odd, unreliable little sister who threw everyone for a loop, from childhood right through to adulthood, to when she drove the car off of a bridge. Iris mourns her losses, but she mourns them from a distance, bitterly, in a tone that doesn’t suggest “loss” so much as “betrayal.” It’s Iris who ripped my heart out and had me questioning the very purpose of love, of life.
Alongside Iris’s narrative, in alternating sections of four or five chapters each, the reader gets to slowly make his or her way through Laura Chase’s novel The Blind Assassin, published posthumously. In this novel, two lovers meet in secret, a man in hiding and a woman on edge. They are from different worlds entirely, he a lower-class freedom fighter, she an upper-class party-goer, and they meet intermittently for passionate lovemaking and inspired storytelling. What little money he still makes, he makes from writing stories, and she begs him to make one up for her. In between scotch, cigarettes and sex, he tells her a story about an ancient society of idol-worshippers, child slavery, virgin sacrifices, wild tribal massacres, the fourth storyline of Atwood’s novel.
As Atwood’s novel progresses, the connections between Iris’s present and past stories, as well as the connections between Iris’s narrative and Laura’s novel, unfurl and reveal themselves in profound (albeit predictable) ways. By the end of the book, no stone is left unturned and the truth has been laid out, in its entirety, for the reader to inspect. It was refreshing to read a book with such a concrete ending. And while I say the loose ends are tied up somewhat predictably, I wasn’t upset by this. It didn’t seem like Atwood was backing out of anything by having the course of actions take an already-worn path (because she wasn’t). This book wasn’t a story about things that have never happened before (except for those sci-fi excerpts in Laura’s novel): it was a book articulating loss and turmoil in a way they’ve never before been articulated. It’s not about Iris’s story as much as it’s about her outlook; it’s about reaction more than action.
All in all, I recommend this book and look forward to continuing to read Atwood’s writing. In addition to being an amazing writer who tells incredible stories about faith and humanity and good and evil, I really life the effect her writing has on my own. Ha. The only other Atwood novel I’ve read is The Handmaid’s Tale, which I also wholeheartedly recommend, and I hear her collection Moral Disorder is also pretty swell. You probably just can’t really go wrong when you’re choosing something, honestly.
Happy reading! Smile <3
