The Blind Assasin Review

Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin is a multi-level story. An 83 year old woman, Iris Chase Griffin creates a diary of her days as the wrapper for sections of a bigger tale -- her autobiography. Intermixed with this narrative is a second book called The Blind Assassin which is also multi-layered. The wrapper for this second book is the story of two unnamed lovers, a man on the run and a wealthy woman, who meet in secret on stolen afternoons. The inner story is the science fiction tale that the lovers compose together while idly lying in bed after making love. To these narratives, Atwood adds newspaper clippings that describe social events of the day.

I first read The Blind Assassin 2 years ago. After 70 pages, I was ready to quit it, but the friend who had loaned it to me was so insistent on its quality, that I skimmed much of the rest of the book before returning it to her. I did not like it. But I knew I had not done it justice, and so when it came time to read it as part of the Times 100 list, I decided to read every word. And I did. It is a long book at 520 pages, and longer still because of the long paragraphs filled with lush prose. No matter how beautiful the prose, it rambles. An editor should have trimmed it.

I was glad for the second reading. Each of the tales go through surprise twists and turns and so it begs for a second reading just to make sense of all that has happened.

Iris starts her narrative discussing the death (possible suicide) of her sister Laura who was 25 at the time. She then moves back in time and gives a history of her family and her marriage to Richard Griffin.


There is an intricate structure to the book. In the first 14 pages, we read two news clippings. The first reports Laura's death. The second is Richard's obituary two years later. (The remainder of the book provides the story of how and why these two events occurred.) In that same space of 14 pages, we have also been introduced to all of the tales. The two books: the autobiography and The Blind Assassin, are intertwined and actually meet in time and place about three-fourths of the way through. There are many parallels between the stories. And there is a buried structural symmetry in the telling of Laura's book.

Did I like the book? Out of the 20 on the Time 100 list I've read this past 6 months, it is #3 on my list; I like to chew on books and this is a chewy book. I liked the story of the lovers and their created story. The autobiography of Iris felt like Dickens with pretty prose - but it's not my cup of tea. My biggest disappointment was in not liking Iris - which is why I didn't want to read it the first time around.

So what did I chew on? (Spoilers in here!) Why does Laura not tell Iris about what is happening to her? Is Laura insane? Why doesn't Alex leave Toronto? Why doesn't he try to make a new life in another place? Iris makes a new life for herself, but she never remarries. Is that predictable? There are any number of parallels in the tales. What is the purpose of the science fiction story? Why is the book called The Blind Assassins?