In this novel, Margaret Atwood delivers robust storytelling on two fronts. Plagued by a heart ailment, the aging former socialite Iris Chase Griffen recounts chilling memories of her industrialist family leading up to the point when her idiosyncratic younger sister, Laura, drove a car off a bridge. Iris’s memories alternate with a story, presumably written by Laura, that describes two lovers meeting secretly to flesh out the details of a sci-fi plot together.
Atwood strikes a remarkable balance between the slow, meandering pace of Iris’s narrative voice and the rapid pace set by the lovers’ hasty meetings and colorful imaginations. After reading a bit of one story, I found myself itching to return to the other one. Both Iris’s autobiographical tale and “The Blind Assassin” (the name of the story-within-a story) address difficult issues related to Canadian history and the human condition: the separation, divisiveness, and hardship caused by war; sibling rivalry, social corruption, and rigid class divisions. Even the city of Sakiel-Norn, which forms the main setting for the lovers’ sci-fi book, is filled with violence and infighting between the social elite. It therefore reflects the fraught upbringing of Iris and Laura: growing up in the turmoil of WWI and the Great Depression, they are doomed to be used as political pawns when their father runs out of money and needs to ally himself with the wealthy Griffen family.
Iris writes with pith and wry humor, yet the pain in her voice is palpable as the demons of her family’s past begin to catch up with her late in her life. She has returned home to the sleepy Canadian Town of Port Ticonderoga, where she and Laura spent their childhoods, but the march of time cannot stop her old memories from haunting her. Take this passage, when Iris gazes at the familiar river that cuts through the town:
“I stood on the bridge and stared over the side, at the water upstream, smooth as taffy, dark and silent, all menacing potential…I became conscious of my heart, and of dizziness. Also of breathlessness, as if I were in over my head. But over my head in what? Not water; something thicker. Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.”
p. 299
While the sights, sounds, and smells of Port Ticonderoga are comfortably familiar, Iris’s memories are a constant source of disturbance. She must set the tale of her life to paper in order to free herself from the heaviness of the past: her forced marriage to the ruthless Richard Griffen at the age of eighteen; her mother’s early death and her father’s alcoholism; Laura’s eccentric, unruly nature.
The novel describes the past as insidious, creeping into the settled present and creating waves of discontent. Paradoxically, it also describes the past as something to cherish and hold onto. When the two lovers in “The Blind Assassin” are separated by war, the woman (who is of higher class status and shielded from the fighting) struggles to remember what her partner looks like:
“Her mind can’t hold him… It’s as if a breeze blows over the water and he’s dispersed, into broken colours, into ripples, then he reforms elsewhere, past the next pillar, taking on his familiar body. Around him is a shimmering.
The shimmering is his absence, but it appears to her as light. It’s the simple daily light by which everything around her is illuminated. Every morning and night, every glove and shoe, every chair and plate.”
p. 413
Is “The Blind Assassin” truly Laura’s story—written by Laura, about Laura? We don’t know for sure, but one thing is certain: the autobiographical story of Iris and the story of the two lovers crafting their sci-fi adventure are designed to parallel each other and they share many themes in common. Iris writes to face her painful memories and take ownership of them in her old age, while the two lovers—separated by a considerable class divide and sometimes immense geographic distance—write to maintain their relationship, the only constant in their lives. All in all, readers of Atwood’s novel close the book contemplating how the written word provides grants agency to people who have none.
