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The Blind Assassin.
Atwood, Margaret (author).
2000. 400p. Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, hardcover, $26 (0-385-47572-1).
REVIEW.
First published June 1, 2000 (Booklist).
Stories spin within stories in this spellbinding novel of avarice, love, and revenge. It begins in Toronto in 1945 when Laura Chase, 25 years old, drives a car off a bridge. Iris Chase Griffen, her older sister and wife of a wealthy and conniving businessman, seems more concerned with the proper attire for her trip to the reporter-ringed morgue than with her sister’s fate, but readers should never underestimate an Atwood heroine’s capacity for self-discipline and subterfuge. Iris has had to perfect the art of self-abnegation ever since her mother’s death, when her father, a compassionate manufacturer, asked her to look after Laura. Sheltered and naive, the girls were ripe pickings for Richard, to whom their father handed over his business and family property, including 18-year-old Iris, and Alex Thomas, a labor activist implicated in arson and murder, who may or may not be Laura’s lover. Atwood, whose wit, metaphorical descriptions, and elegant characterizations are breathtaking in their beauty and resonance, weaves an intriguing trifurcate narrative. Newspaper articles document Canada’s Red scare, the political and industrial jockeying for war profits, and high-society goings-on. Iris’ wry memoir, which she is writing in the present at the end of her difficult life, reveals at long last the wrenching truth about herself and Laura amid hilariously acerbic commentary on the inanities of contemporary life. And then there are the most mysterious sections, chapters from Laura’s posthumously published novel, The Blind Assassin an erotic and poignant story of illicit love between a socialite and a radical fugitive, who charms his lover with fantastic stories about the planet Zycron, where a blind assassin falls in love with a mute sacrificial virgin. Aptly enough, figurative forms of blindness and silence are both bane and antidote in the thwarted lives Atwood conjures so masterfully. (Reviewed June 1 & 15, 2000)— Donna Seaman
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