Athena K's Review - The Blind Assassin

I finished this book a few days ago, and have spent the time reflecting that it is in many ways a perfect novel.  This is one of those books that gets better the more you think about it.

As many reviewers have noted, Margaret Atwood tells us the same story in three different ways (or four, depending on how you count them): (1) Newspaper clippings describing events, (2) Iris Chase Griffin's memoirs in her last years and (3) the story The Blind Assassin, in which an anonymous man tells a science fiction story to his lover.  These narration are interwoven throughout the novel.  All three of these types of narration have strengths and weaknesses, and while all three are describing the same era and events, the impression we get of the characters is vastly different.  None of them tells a complete story.  The reader is forced to guess and fill in the blanks throughout.  Ironically, we discover that the news clippings, perhaps the most objectively "true" are in fact the least accurate versions of what occurred.  In many ways, the  fictional story The Blind Assassin is the most accurate telling of history. 

Strikingly, the portrayal of Iris herself in these narrations varies the most.  Her passivity makes her a remarkably un-interesting character - except that she isn't nearly as passive as we might believe.  I'm not sure if we can ascribe her passivity to "the role of women at the time" - certainly Atwood has commentary on the subject, but Winnifred Griffin Prior is also a woman of the time and she is certainly not a passive participant in her life or in others'.  Thankfully for the story, Iris is in fact complex, complicated, and dynamic - and a great narrator.

I've also been pondering the story The Blind Assassin and its significance to the novel as a whole.  Is Iris the true Blind Assassin?  Is she more like the sacrificial, tongueless girl in the story?  What is the significance of the various endings to the story that are played with?  I will have to re-read this with these questions in mind.

Of course, Atwood's brilliant style shines within this structure.  I have been a fan of hers for years, but somehow did not get around to reading this one before.  She picks apart the English language in digressions, implements turns of phrase with ease and cleverness, and sucks you in.  And although she tells you the ending in the first 2 or 3 chapters, she still manages to surprise and shock.  What more can you ask for?

Lorraine's Review - The Blind Assassin

This is a vastly entertaining novel in several ways as it presents four stylistically different narratives. It begins with the personal recollection by Iris Chase Griffen of her life in Port Ticonderoga, Ontario in the first half of the 20th century. We immediately learn that her younger sister, Laura Chase, has driven her car off a bridge. The description of the tragedy is relayed through a newspaper article. These articles are written in the stilted vernacular of the period and they act as a kind of newsreel binding the time line in the novel together. The other narratives are two stories in one as a couple meet covertly and share in conjuring a continuing serial about the fantasy planet of Zycron. The title of the cult novel attributed to Laura  after her death is The Blind Assassin.

I enjoyed the romance of the relationship between the lovers which stood in contrast to Iris's often stoical writing about her life. The serial had the feeling of stepping back into a childhood fairytale but one filled with sex, seduction and secret trysts. This novella is filled with a kind of morbid arch humour as when the assassin is in the temple:

“The blind assassin hauls the dead sentry out from under the bed and arranges her on the coverlet, with her scarf concealing the slash on her throat. She’s not cold yet, and has stopped dripping. Too bad if the fellow has a bright candle; otherwise, in the night all cats are grey. Temple maidens are trained to manifest inertia. It might take the man – hampered as he is by his ponderous god costume, which traditionally includes a helmet and visor – some time to discover he’s fucking the wrong woman, and a dead one at that.”

The novel has a complex start with multiple dimensions and viewpoints but I felt it was well worth pursuing. I was always tantalized by knowing what lay ahead through the clippings and Atwood gives the reader a partial omniscient perspective by revealing these glimpses of the future.

I found the writing remarkable. There are certain passages like the death of the girls’ mother where you know there are so many things going on under the surface of the girls’ experience of the events of her death:

“Mother died five days later. She died of a fever; also of being weak, because she could not manage to get her strength back, said Reenie. During this time the doctor came and went, and a succession of crisp, brittle nurses occupied the easy chair in the bedroom. Reenie hurried up and down the stairs with basins, with towels, with cups of broth. Father shuttled relentlessly back and forth to the factory, and appeared at the dinner table haggard as a beggar. Where had he been, that afternoon when he could not be found? Nobody said.”

This prose encapsulates the cold shuttling relationships in the family and the lack of love in the girls’ lives. They grow up essentially alone and are shuffled later into a forced life by their father and his chief competitor, Richard Griffen (who is Iris’ dreadful husband). Their only escape – like many women - is their private hidden life. The novel reminded me slightly of Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel as the narrators -Hagar and Iris – are near the ends of their lives and looking backwards. They are both from privileged backgrounds in small communities and are unvanquished despite their life experiences.

Iris is quietly observant and acidly funny as when she describes her physician:

“The doctor tapped my ribs and eavesdropped on my heart, and frowned and then cancelled his frown, and then – having made up his mind about it – asked me how I was feeling. I believe he has done something to his hair; surely he used to be thinner on top. Has he been indulging in the gluing on of strands across his scalp? Or worse, transplantation? Aha, I thought. Despite your jogging and the hairiness of your legs, the shoe of aging is beginning to pinch. Soon you’ll regret all that sun-tanning. Your face will look like a testicle.”

The Blind Assassin is a rewarding, surprising and rich reading experience.









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Matthew's Review - The Blind Assassin - 2000

The only Margaret Atwood I had ever read was for university, and I hadn't been terribly impressed. When I saw Atwood's name on the Booker list I had trepidations. However, The Blind Assassin defied my expectations in a great way.

The Blind Assassin is comprised of two alternating stories. The first is the recollections and memories of Iris Chase, whose sister, Laura, mysteriously died in an automobile accident and left behind a manuscript which Iris then published posthumously. The manuscript, "The Blind Assassin", being the second story. Iris' story charts her and her sister's early childhood, adolescence, and eventually, Iris' unhappy marriage to a wealthy industrialist in Canada between the two Wars.

The fictional story is nested within another story. "The Blind Assassin" in the novel is a roman à clef based on a man named Alex Thomas whom the sisters have an uneasy and mysterious relationship. In the story, the fictional version of Alex, tells a fantastic science fiction tale to the fictional version of Laura.

This is certainly a postmodern novel, made up stories about stories. It's also a tremendous and successful work, with the alternating voices are written in two different, beautiful voices with gorgeous and supple prose. The plot strand set in reality is a long social history and social development of the two girls set between the Wars, and of Canada's adolescence as a country. Conversely, the story-within-the-story is never boring and nested with symbols and images that reflect and echo all the way to the "top" story. The execution of this trick is absolutely masterful.

Luckily, Atwood isn't interested in postmodern trickery for the sake of it. Everything has been put in its place for a specific reason, and the payoff at the end is amazing. Without going into spoilers, the end of the novel ties the two stories together in an interesting and unexpected way, and the story nested within the fictional book pays off as well.

All the symbols come together to contribute to Atwood's overarching themes of her oeuvre, of the power of the written word, of the gender roles assigned by society, and the power to rewrite history.

Atwood's The Blind Assassin is a wonderful novel, one that I would surely consider one of the best Canadian novels ever written. The prose is pure poetry, the stories epic and engaging, the characters very real, and the structure intricate. I would wholeheartedly recommend this novel as one of the best of the Booker, and I would recommend this to anybody interested in fine literature.

If interested, there are more Booker reviews by Matthew at this link which goes to my blog a lay of the land. Thanks for reading.

Marieke's review - The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

A rich, lustrous evocation of a world. Why Iris is telling us her story is not immediately obvious, but she certainly has plenty to tell. And she has her share of secrets, as we come to realise.

Iris is a peculiar narrator. She seems to be telling us her own story -- her marriage to Richard, her entry into womanhood and motherhood, the high society circles she moves in due to the influence of her wealthy husband and sister-in-law -- but actually all this is just the backdrop for the 'real' focus, which is always her sister, Laura.

Laura glows with a golden light like the aura that she paints onto a photo of herself once, as a prank. She seems to be the wonderfully alive, eerily insightful and unconventional heroine of Iris's narrative, despite the fact that she dies in the first line of the book.

Laura haunts Iris as she haunts the town they grew up in, as her words appear quoted on bathroom stalls and literary prizes are given in her name, fifty years after her death. Iris is haunted also by the promise she made her father:

'If anything happens,' he said finally, 'you must promise to look after Laura.' (124)

There is a shuttling back-and-forth of the narrative as several strands weave together: Iris's current, elderly comings and goings; her vivid reminiscences that take her back to her girlhood and then forward in time; newspaper clippings marking important occurences in the Chase family history (deaths especially); and the haunting passages from The Blind Assassin, a novel by Iris's sister Laura (published posthumously).

One of the magical things about this story is that it seems absolutely present and vivid in each of its moments. Thus when we reach the 'present day' it truly does feel as if a lifetime has passed. Near the end of the book I felt I was reaching back into an ancient past to recall the lives of Iris and Laura as girls.

The Blind Assassin (the book within the book) features an anonymous young man who is telling a science-fiction story aloud to an anonymous young woman as they meet secretly, over years. I loved the oral storytelling quality of these chapters and I always wanted more when they ended. Atwood charges those moments with passion, longing and indulgence; the world of Zycron becomes a romantic interlude, true escapism. I wanted to go there.

I suppose this is a story about how imagination can free us from the confines of our lives. Iris spends her life in confinement, imprisoned by class expectations, by a forced sense of propriety in a society she never wanted to be part of, and not least, by a tyrannical husband and his sister-minion.

I can't do justice to the degrading horror that was Iris's marriage. But what strikes even more powerfully is that Atwood reminds us that these horrors were not uniquely Iris's; they were commonplace, even expected. This was how women's lives were then.

About my bridal night... I didn't know what to expect; my only informant had been Reenie, who had led me to believe that whatever would happen would be unpleasant and most likely painful, and in this I was not deceived. She'd also implied that this disagreeable event or sensation would be nothing out of the ordinary - all women went through it, or all who got married - so I shouldn't make a fuss. Grin and bear it had been her words. (294)

We do find out eventually that Iris's and Richard's relationship is not ordinary in the slightest, though the power dynamics that make her completely dependent on him are the conventional, unremarkable ones. The power structures that enslave women and treat them as property.

I was sand, I was snow - written on, rewritten, smoothed over. (455)

This story reveals, more than anything else, the utter devastation wrought by a woman's enforced passivity and helplessness in a male-dominated world.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You can find my original review on my blog here.

2000 - The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Beware: lots of spoilers if you haven't read the book.

This story is superb. Atwood is one of the best writers of our time, and everything I've read of hers (The Handmaid's Tale, The Robber Bride, Oryx and Crake and The Penelopiad) has been terrific. The Blind Assassin is complex, and readers have to be content with ambiguity, but it's well worth it.

Iris is the narrator, but that's not clear at first. She's an old woman, remembering, setting the record straight (she says) for her grand-daughter, Sabrina. She ponders her sister's suicide and a parallel story, a strange fantasy novel , which seems to the reader at first to be completely irrelevant. It is supposed to have been posthumously published by an unidentified pair of authors, then the author of this story-within-a-story is revealed as Iris's dead sister Laura - but it's not, and eventually it becomes clear that Iris wrote it herself, not Laura.

Two sisters, relics of an older time when women were merely decorative pawns, bought and sold to enhance the social position of the men in their lives. In class-conscious Britain, the Chase family would have been dismissed with a haughty sniff as 'Trade', but in Canada, in the backblocks beyond Toronto, theirs was a respectable old family with a asuccessful manufacturing business and the girls had to 'marry well'.

Why, I wondered, did Richard Griffin, a wealthy industrialist in his own right, want to marry Iris when her father's button factory failed? Was the Chase family name really so valuable that a dynamic man like him would want an insipid, ineffectual wife? All the efforts of Winifred, Richard's awful sister, to mould Iris as a suitable wife failed; like Laura, Iris became dreamy and feeble (and didn't eat) to avoid unpleasantness, and she's a failure as a society wife.

Both Laura and Iris are besotted by Alex Thomas. He was some kind of subversive during the Depression, presumably in the pay of the Russians; then he's involved in the Spanish Civil War and finally killed off in WW2. Laura learns of his death through a telegram because he had named her next of kin, a message from beyond the grave that shows which sister he preferred.

Iris is the narrator, so we're told that Alex loved her, but he was also Laura's lover. The strange stories interwoven with the main story purport to be Laura's account of events, but as we eventually know, they were really written by Iris. They tell of meetings in sleazy rooms, of Alex composing SF fantasies, and how he finally sends one of these stories off for publication. Through these co-authored stories we see Alex for what he is: brutal, ruthless and manipulative; the female contributions bring softenings, happy endings and kindness. When Iris finds a copy in a trashy store, she's surprised to find that her 'blind assassin' and the 'mute virgin' have been omitted from the story. Stripped of her fantasies, the story is what her behaviour has been: merely sordid.

As the pages turn, Iris finally realises what the reader has already concluded: Richard has a penchant for young girls and his taste extended to Laura. He forced Laura to abort her child, but the child Iris bears is Alex's. Iris names the baby Aimee, but she's not much loved by her mother, who's not a loving person at all....She's a real old misery. She paints herself as exploited and bullied, but she's scornful of Reenie and her daughter Myra - both of whom are good to her in her old age. She's very conscious of money and status - her own social standing is ambiguous, but she's delighted to see Winifred snubbed.

So, who is the blind assassin? The one who doesn't see, sent to murder the sacrificial virgin as a way of challenging the status quo? Not Alex, although by seducing both girls he's just the same as Richard, only seedier. I think that Iris is - she pretends to be the mute innocent who finally reveals all, using Laura's name to publish the book that ruins Richard's career. She does this under the pretext of needing to tell the truth to Sabrina, in a vain attempt to win back her grand-daughter's affection.

It's Iris who tells Laura that she had a secret affair with Alex, so that Laura drives off a bridge in despair. It's Iris who publishes the book and drives Richard to suicide. Her choices are vindictive, cruel and spiteful; she seems not to have a real freind or confidante anywhere. When her daughter and grand-daughter reject her just as Myra's mother Reenie finally does, she has no one to blame but herself.

It's beautifully written, capturing the tone of the period with details of clothes, buildings and politics, and Atwood has complete mastery of her characters. Iris is a sardonic snob, much given to judging others and utterly wrong about people because she's so superficial. And yet, we feel just a little pity for her in her loneliness, at the end.

I finished reading this book and journalled it on 31.3.2002.

Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

The Blind Assassin - Atwood, Jackie's Review

This is the first book by Margaret Atwood that I have read. Reviews of her books always seem to be very positive, so I was expecting a good book. Unfortunately I was very disappointed. The plot was predictable and uninspiring. The characters had no special qualities, and came across as boring people. The writing was OK, but not particularly atmospheric. I was expecting much more, from a prize winning book by a critically acclaimed author.


Many reviews state that this is a hard book to get into, and confusing, as it skips around so much. I didn’t find this to be a problem, as there was a good read before the book skipped time frames. I also found it quite easy to get into. The book flowed along well throughout it’s 600+ pages, but at the end I felt let down. I’ll have forgotten about this book in a few days, as there was nothing special about it.

Very average.

5 out of 10 stars

Trevor's Review of Atwood's The Blind Assassin

"Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drover a car off a bridge."

That begins this tangled story of two sisters and their tumultuous life in the unstable wealth of the 1930s. In her masterful way, Atwood delves deeply into this story and somehow puts together a controlled, coherent, and brilliant tale out of what at first appears to be disordered scraps: newspaper articles, the memories, a novel within a novel within the novel. It's a complex construction, but somehow Atwood makes it seem easy.

"What had she been thinking as the car sailed off the bridge, then hung suspended in the afternoon sunlight, glinting like a dragonfly, for that one instant of held breath before the plummet? Of Alex, of Richard, of bad faith, of our father and his wreckage; of God, perhaps, and her fatal, triangular bargain."

It takes a while to figure out just what all of these factors have to do with Laura and Iris, the surviving sister telling the tale. But they come together, and as is typical with Atwood, they come together in intricate, psychologically and socially realistic ways.

Also, though this book takes place in a more realistic (at least, more of what we've come to accept as realistic) way than her other books, one of the layers of this tale is a wonderful science fiction story--The Blind Assassin--a picture of a tyrannical, chaotic world that at first glance has nothing to do with ours. It takes a bit of work to figure out just what all of these elements have to do with each other. But when they came together, I couldn't imagine a clearer portrayal of the underlying emotions. Highly recommended.
4 stars out of 5.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Backblurb: The Blind Assassin opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist. Brilliantly weaving together such seemingly disparate elements, Atwood creates a world of astonishing vision and unforgettable impact.

My take: I started out pretty well, then slowly getting more and more disoriented. With more characters introduced, I felt things getting murkier. After recovering several chapters in , and sorting out who was who, backtracking to understand the importance of newspaper stories interspersed ... I started picking up pace and started enjoying myself. I was hooked.

The Blind Assassin - Kristen's Review

The Blind Assassin | $18.98 | 544 pp.

The Blind Assassin opens with the statement, "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." Only at the end of the book, when everything about this meandering, tragic, cryptic narrative of two sisters comes to its point, do you understand this sentence, down to the significance of its indefinite articles.

From the vantage point of old age, Iris, Laura's older sister, writes the story of their comings of age in the Depression. Laura is "strange," "odd"; she has deeply-held, unconventional religious beliefs, and exhibits a naivete dangerous for a young girl who is soon cut adrift by the falling apart of her family. Meanwhile, Iris understands more about the world around her. Two men dominate the lives and minds of each of the women in complex ways that Atwood only fully reveals near the end: one is a sinister figure, wealthy and powerful; one is an idealistic activist in hiding, easily worshipped.

Meanwhile, the story of two nameless lovers, written in the present tense, third-person, close but not too close to the consciousness of the woman. They tell each other stories, they sleep together, they play emotional games. He's harsh and often needlessly brutal, she's brave but vulnerable. Then there are newspaper articles, which use an amusingly cheesy style to encapsulate in puff pieces events which often have deep implications in Iris's or Laura's life.

To say more about the plot would give too much away, even though Atwood's beautiful prose is so prominent and memorable that it might be more of a draw than the story she spins. The deft way that she weaves this story and explores the identity of the two sisters, the artistry of it, become more and more apparent and then just dazzle in the climax. Iris's voice is authoritative and convincingly that of an old woman; her view on her own actions as a young woman is slightly more distant, and so focused on trying to find out more about the people around her that sometimes Young Iris is more of an enigma than her distracted, "odd" sister. Though the people in this book are very real, they're also separate and isolated in the labyrinth of human society.

If I had a complaint it was that the first couple hundred pages started so slowly. They were beautifully written, to be sure, but almost too mysterious -- I needed more. On the other hand, maybe it kept me reading, and I'm certainly glad that I did.

The Blind Assassin - 3M's Review

The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood

2000, 521 pp.

Booker Prize

Rating: 3.5



I was disappointed in this book. I expected great things after loving The Handmaid's Tale earlier in the year. I was especially disappointed as it was over 500 pages; it could have easily lost about 100 pages of detail. I guess that's my main gripe about it. It just seemed too detailed for me. Also I correctly predicted almost all that happened. Long, too detailed, and too predictable. But still, Atwood does know how to turn a phrase, and that is why it still gets a 3.5 star rating.

The Blind Assassin - Wendy's Book Review

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get? At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down. -From The Blind Assassin, page 95-

In Margaret Atwood's Booker Prize winning novel The Blind Assassin, we are treated to a novel which is a story within a story - a memorial of sorts to the life of two women...Iris Chase Griffin and her sister Laura. The novel opens with the death of Laura...and a mystery. Atwood builds her story through a series of newspaper clippings, flashbacks from Iris' perspective on her life, and a piece of fiction about a man and a woman and the story they weave.

True to Atwood's style, the characters are painstakingly created and come alive on the page. No less detailed, Atwood constructs a small town setting within the bigger context of World War II. The result is a tale Gothic in feel, full of shadowy half truths and complex relationships which come together for a satisfying finish.

To give more detail about the novel would be to reveal spoilers - and so I will simply say "Read it." Atwood is a brilliant novelist that continues to amaze me with her scope and talent.

Highly Recommended; rated 4.5/5; read my original review here.