The Blind Assassin 8380

Reviews:
‘Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is a fascinating and compelling read! There are so many seemingly competing stories which add to the complexity of the narrator and her life. They are also next to impossible to fully understand without the rest of the stories (as strange and disjointed as they sometimes appear). The result is that the reader stays somewhat lost until all the pieces fall into place. The novel begins with the death (apparently suicide) of the narrator’s sister. This beginning section is engaging; however, the payoff for following all the story’s threads comes much later in the narrative. By about the final 100 pages I was savoring the experience of discovery: how each story had always been purposeful and relevant all along. I’m a big fan of Margaret Atwood’s works, but this is very different than anything I’d read before (like Handmaid’s Tale or Oryx & Crake). 4.5 stars rounded up. Very worthwhile!‘ – Goodreads review

‘I’ll start with a bit of personal baggage, because my first exposure to Margaret Atwood’s writing was The Handmaid’s Tale, which I read when I was young because my parents had a copy. That book is probably the best known of her early novels, which does her a disservice, as it seemed one-dimensional, humourless and cold (though I would almost certainly be more charitable if I re-read it now).

This got me thinking about how one’s perceptions of a writer can be shaped by how and where we first experience them, and how much can be lost if something unrepresentative gets overhyped or taught at schools and colleges, or even how reading something before you are ready for it can prejudice you. I did make one further attempt a few years later when I picked up a second hand copy of the story collection Bluebeard’s Egg, but to be honest I don’t really remember that. Since then I have never returned to Atwood until now. This seems criminally negligent in the light of the Blind Assassin, which is brilliant, so many thanks to the 21st Century Literature group for choosing this book for one of this month’s group discussions.

The Blind Assassin has quite a complex structure. It begins with Iris, an embittered old woman remembering her younger sister Laura’s death, a suicide that was covered up. Laura has a fanatical posthumous following due to a book, also called the Blind Assassin. This forms most of the sections that alternate with Iris’s memoir, and it tells the story of its writer’s affair with a fugitive writer and the stories he and the narrator make up about a mythical society. This novel within a novel (a device that reminded my quite strongly of A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower, another book that contained excerpts from a novel written by one of its characters) is itself interspersed with pithy newspaper articles which give the “official” version of the events of Laura and Iris’s lives, and their families.

The plot is ultimately much more complex than the family story or the novel within a novel, but the whole thing has much to say about sibling rivalry and secrets. Iris recounts her own family story, the story of their childhood and the story of her disastrous marriage to a wealthy but insensitive businessman and her relationship with his scheming sister. This account does occasionally come close to getting tedious, but is invariably redeemed by wry observations and occasional clues that the story is not as simple as it seems at first glance, many of which are much more significant than they appear initially.

The denouement is brilliantly plotted and very moving. This is a wonderful, clever and richly nuanced book which thoroughly deserved its Booker Prize. I will be reading more of Margaret Atwood’s work.‘ – Goodreads review