The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood
Summary
Iris Chase Griffen is eighty two, poor, and living alone in the Ontario town her family's button factory once ran. She is writing an account of her life for a granddaughter who will not speak to her, and she begins with the sentence that her sister Laura drove a car off a bridge ten days after the war ended.
Three narratives run together. Iris's memoir of a childhood of declining money, a marriage at eighteen to an industrialist she did not choose, and the 1930s in Toronto. A novel called The Blind Assassin, published under Laura's name after her death, about two anonymous lovers meeting in rented rooms. And inside that novel, a lurid science fiction story the man invents for the woman, about a doomed city and a mute sacrificial girl.
The pleasure is in watching the three levels comment on each other and slowly reveal who wrote what and why. Atwood is in complete control and the final pages rearrange everything you thought you knew.
It is long and the first hundred pages are deliberately unhurried. Iris is a wonderful narrator, dry and unforgiving about her own conduct, and the period detail of a Canadian industrial family collapsing between the wars is done without a wasted word.
A strong choice for readers who found The Handmaid's Tale too bleak and want Atwood in her realist mode, and an unusually satisfying long novel for a holiday. The science fiction sections inside the inner novel are the part readers most often skim and most often regret skimming.
Historical Context & Significance
The Blind Assassin won the Booker Prize in 2000, Margaret Atwood's tenth novel and her first win after three previous shortlistings for The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye and Alias Grace.
It was received as a career recognition as much as a verdict on the book, Atwood being sixty and long established as the most prominent novelist in Canada. Reviewers concentrated on the structure, a book inside a book inside a book, and on how completely the layers resolve.
She won the Booker again in 2019 for The Testaments, in the shared decision with Bernardine Evaristo, making her one of a small number of double winners. The Blind Assassin remains the choice of most critics as the better of the two, and is the book usually named when Atwood's realist fiction is set beside her speculative work.