The Blind Assassin (2000)
Who wrote it?
Margaret Eleanor Atwood (1939- ; active 1961-), born Ottawa, Canada. Prolific across multiple genres (poetry, novels, non-fiction, children's fiction, graphic novels) and decades, Atwood has won just about every award going, including two Bookers.
Owing to her father's remote forestry research, she did not attend school full-time until she was 12, but developed a voracious passion for literature and realized she wanted to write professionally at the age of 16. She published her first book of poetry in 1961, while completing her degree at the University of Toronto, though her first novel (The Edible Woman) was not released until 1969.
Atwood is probably most famous for 1985's The Handmaid's Tale, which lost out (somewhat shockingly, in my view) to Kingsley Amis' The Old Devils in the '86 Prize. She has been nominated a total of five times, and won her second Booker in 2019, sharing the award with Bernadine Evaristo for her Handmaid's Tale sequel, The Testaments.
What's it about?
The Blind Assassin contains three layers of narrative (all, it seems, titled The Blind Assassin.) The main story is realist novel with a grand historical sweep across major events of Canadian and world history, narrated by Iris Chase-Griffen, from the vantage point of the present day and addressed to her one surviving granddaughter. In this narrative, she reflects on her life and especially her relationship with her sister Laura, who died in a (presumably deliberate) car crash 10 days after the end of the Second World War. We also learn that her husband, the businessman and aspiring politician Richard Griffen, drowned shortly afterwards.
The main narrative is interspersed with extracts from a novel published in Laura Chase’s name, posthumously, which details an intense, if ultimately flawed, affair between an unnamed man and woman, during and before the war. To make this more complex, the male character in this story narrates a science fiction tale about the titular “blind assassin” in fragments at each of their meetings. Added to all of this, the novel is interspersed with press extracts that view the novel’s main characters from a distance, slowly unveiling more of the story.
Eventually, the three parts of the story come together, in an almost murder mystery reveal fashion, to explain what really happened to lead to the deaths of the main characters, and sheds light on Iris’s guilt and regret which permeates her story.
What I liked
My short summary doesn’t really do justice to the richness of this book. There are so many interesting strands, even just within the main narrative. From Laura’s disturbing experience with a childhood tutor, to Iris & Laura’s father’s alcoholism during the Great Depression; the supremely awful machinations of Winifred Griffen, and of course the man kept hidden in the attic…
For all of this, the central narrative never feels overly complex and is in fact a fantastically engrossing, almost luxuriant read.
It’s obviously a page-turner. I’m notoriously terrible at predicting the outcome of novels (never been a fan of mysteries, etc) so it certainly kept me guessing until the end. Some more astute readers may have been able to see where it was going though (there are certainly plenty of clues)
Despite some frustrations with the Russian Doll-layered narratives (see below) they did come together in a really satisfying way.
There are some interesting implications of these sub-stories in terms of the role of genre: what is the method that really gets best to the heart of a traumatic experience - highly metaphorical science fiction, depersonalised romance, or plain-speaking reality? Given the rest of Atwood’s oeuvre, it’s a fascinating question and one that seems to come bound with deeper thoughts around the role of each of these modes in relation to their proximity to an event (moving from the active need to hide subversive/dangerous sentiments in metaphor, through to a later-life reckoning with the unvarnished “truth”)
What I didn’t like
I had a couple of issues with the layers of story, despite their impressive intricacy:
First up, I initially found it difficult to orient myself in the story. I’ll give this one a pass, since it’s evidently a deliberate tactic, but still a tricky and unpromising way to start a novel (and a likely reason it’s another one that’s sat on my shelf for years, unfinished, until now…)
Next, I didn’t really get on with the sci-fi subplot. I understand the role of these modes in fiction - it occasionally reminded me a bit of the way Vonnegut would pepper his realist stories with vignettes from the pen of his sci-fi alter ego Kilgore Trout. But while those little stories are pithily insightful, I found most of the extracts here to be somewhat tedious and struggled on occasion to get to the point of their allusions.
Finally, and probably the main thing that stopped me giving this an even higher score, I just found all of the sub-stories to be an unwelcome distraction from a highly compelling central tale which I was desperate to get back to every time we digressed! This is a little more damning than the others: it occasionally left me feeling like they were there more as a clever-clever parlour trick than as a genuine enhancement to the reading experience.
Food & drink pairings
Large quantities of food, pushed around one’s plate but never eaten
Crusts of bread, hidden in an attic
Copious quantities of booze, while locked in a turret-room.
Fun facts
The debate over “book or author” rears its head again, and not for the last time with Margaret Atwood winning the Booker. Rose Tremain (a judge that year) is fairly unambiguous about how things played out in 2000:
“Nobody thought Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin was her best book. Where Simon [Jenkins - chair]’s mental agility paid off was in persuading us all (except Mariella [Frostrup - fellow judge]) that Atwood deserved the prize anyway - for all the times she’d nearly won it and had been pipped at the post by a lesser writer.”
Those lesser writers? Kingsley Amis (for The Old Devils in 1986); Kazuo Ishiguro (1989’s Remains of the Day which won over Cat’s Eye); and Graham Swift (1996’s Last Orders triumphed over Alias Grace.) Given the novels involved, I’ll happily concur in two out of three cases (though I’d argue both Amis and Swift may also have been benefactors of the author over book decision), but you’re not having Ishiguro, Rose! Not on my watch :)
Of the three epigraphs at the start of the novel, one was made up by Atwood! The invented inscription on a Phoenician burial urn was a late substitute after Atwood was denied permission to use a quotation from Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, a 1945 experimental novel with clear contextual similarities to the main sub-story in The Blind Assassin.
Vanquished Foes
Trezza Azzopardi (The Hiding Place)
Michael Collins (The Keeper of Truth)
Kazuo Ishiguro (When We Were Orphans)
Matthew Kneale (English Passengers)
Brian O'Doherty (The Deposition of Father McGreevy)
Linda Grant's When I Lived in Modern Times took this year's Orange/Women's Prize, beating out a strong shortlist including Zadie Smith's White Teeth. The Blind Assassin was nominated for the 2001 prize (but didn't win).
Context
In 2000:
Draft assembly of the Human Genome Project announced
George W. Bush defeats Al Gore in US Presidential election following controversial recount in Florida
Doctor Harold Shipman found guilty of mass murder of patients in Manchester, England in the 90s
Concorde crash just after takeoff in Paris kills all on board
Oresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden officially opens for traffic
First resident crew board the International Space Station
France become first football team to hold World Cup and European Championship simultaneously
AOL purchases Time Warner, the largest ever corporate merger at the time
Release of PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube consoles
Nine die in a crush at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, during Pearl Jam's set
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Gladiator
Billy Elliot
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
American Psycho
Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP
Coldplay, Parachutes
Radiohead, Kid A
OutKast, Stankonia
Life Lessons
As in quite a lot of great fiction, so much drama could be avoided by a bit more of a concerted attempt at communication, even where barriers exist?
Similarly, marrying for money never seems to end well, does it?
Score
8
Dangerously close to a higher score - I do love a grand historical sweep. But ultimately hoist on its own petard of clever-cleverness and therefore docked a point or so.
Ranking to date:
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) - 9.5
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (1981) - 9.5
Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee (1999) - 9.5
Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively (1987) - 9
Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth (1992) - 9
Oscar & Lucinda - Peter Carey (1988) - 9
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch (1978) - 9
Life & Times of Michael K. - J. M. Coetzee (1983) - 9
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy (1997) - 9
Schindler’s Ark - Thomas Keneally (1982) - 9
The Bone People - Keri Hulme (1985) - 8.5
How Late it Was, How Late - James Kelman (1994) - 8.5
Troubles - J.G. Farrell (1970, "Lost Booker") - 8.5
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood (2000) - 8
Possession - A. S. Byatt (1990) - 8
Saville - David Storey (1976) - 8
The Siege of Krishnapur - J.G. Farrell (1973) - 8
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje (1992) - 7.5
Rites of Passage - William Golding (1980) - 7.5
Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald (1979) - 7.5
Last Orders - Graham Swift (1996) - 7
The Elected Member - Bernice Rubens (1970) - 7
The Conservationist - Nadine Gordimer (1974) - 7
Holiday - Stanley Middleton (1974) - 7
Heat & Dust - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975) - 6.5
In a Free State* - V.S. Naipaul (1971) - 6.5
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha - Roddy Doyle (1993) - 6
G. - John Berger (1972) - 6
The Famished Road - Ben Okri (1991) - 6
Something to Answer For - P. H. Newby (1969) - 5.5
The Ghost Road** - Pat Barker (1995) - 5.5
Staying On - Paul Scott (1977) - 5
Amsterdam - Ian McEwan (1998) - 5
Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner (1984) - 4.5
The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis (1986) - 4
*Read in later condensed edition.
**Third part of a trilogy of which I hadn’t read pts 1&2
Next up
Another second-time winner, as Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang takes the 2001 Prize.
