Awarded the Booker Prize for 2000, this novel is an example of both postmodernism and feminism and includes elements of science fiction in a complex, multilayered plot rooted in the traditions of realism.

The first-person narrator, Iris Chase Griffen, writes out the story of her life in the last weeks before her death as a direct address to her estranged granddaughter, Sabrina. Iris’s life story is closely intertwined with that of her sister, Laura Chase, killed at the age of 25 in a dramatic crash when the car she was driving—Iris’s car—plummeted over a bridge and burst into flames. Laura has since become a literary phenomenon through the posthumous publication of a novel, The Blind Assassin. Graduate students and scholars of literature revere her work, and sometimes they importune Iris for information about Laura; quotations ascribed to Laura appear scrawled on the walls of women’s bathrooms. Sensing the approach of her death, Iris writes to memorialize Laura and also to set the record straight on the details of their lives.

As each day passes, Iris begins her self-assigned task by writing about her present conditions: she describes the small routines she is able to follow now that she is in her 90s and analyzes the people with whom she interacts. As she writes, she drifts away from the present and into the past, frequently by way of reminders and associations that point her thoughts back to earlier days. Iris’s chief support, Myra, is the daughter of Reenie, the housekeeper for the Chase family while Iris and Laura were growing up; the past and the present are interlaced in Iris’s life, and day by day she reenters the world of her childhood and young adult life by way of the ordinary events of the present.

The Chase family had been powerful and wealthy in the little town of Port Ticonderoga, Ontario, Canada. Iris’s father owned the button factory there, the town’s chief source of employment, having inherited it from a line of Chase entrepreneurs. He expected to hand the business on to his own son someday, but his firstborn child was a daughter, Iris, as was his second-born child, Laura, and his wife died of a miscarriage midway through her third pregnancy. The motherless girls grow up virtually wild, shut out of their father’s life and tended by Reenie when she can spare time for them.

Iris and Laura are children during World War I and then teens as the Roaring Twenties turn into the Great Depression of the 1930s. When economic conditions collapse around the world, the button factory also falls on hard times and the family estate, Avilion, begins to deteriorate. In the most important adventure of their teen years, the girls hide a young man in their attic; he had been trying to unionize the workers at the button factory, and he may know something about the fire that devastated the factory. He fills his enforced idle hours writing to exercise his imagination and makes a safe escape as soon as he can. But his connection to the leftist labor movement and suspicions about his connection to the fire make him a wanted man, and he lives a permanent shadow existence even after he leaves.

This man, Alex Thomas, is later to play another important role in the lives of the sisters and in the creation of The Blind Assassin. Segments of that novel are interleaved with the chapters of Iris’s memories; like Margaret Atwood’s novel, also entitled The Blind Assassin, the inner story has its own inner story. On the surface, it is the story of an illicit and deeply passionate affair between a hack writer of pulp fiction and a married woman of considerable financial means and social status. In addition to their affair, they share the stories he is inventing, such as “Lizard Men of Xenor”; one draft of a story includes the tale of a blind assassin and a sacrificial maiden he rescues.

Gradually, readers become aware of the many parallels and echoes from one level of the story—and of the inner story—to another, and truths that have been hidden for many decades begin to appear between the lines. Additional information comes from newspaper clippings; readers can easily imagine that these, too, have been interleaved with Iris’s memoirs as if she were creating a scrapbook of her life. The clippings resemble the experimental technique used by the American novelist John Dos Passos in his trilogy U.S.A. (1930–36), and in a similar manner they expand the range of the story and increase the novel’s realism.

In The Blind Assassin, Atwood has produced a tour de force of literary virtuosity, demonstrating her command of multiple voices and of the changes that occur in a single character’s voice over the span of nearly a century. The complex structure of doubly layered double narratives is dizzying, but Atwood’s lucid style and consistent characterization keep the story lines distinctive.

Bibliography
Howells, Coral Ann. “Lest We Forget,” Canadian Literature 173 (2002): 114.
Stein, Karen F. “A Left-Handed Story: The Blind Assassin.” In Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Edited by Sharon Rose Wilson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 20th century Canadian literature, Booker Prize 2000, Canadian fiction, Canadian literary canon, Canadian novel, complex narrative structure, experimental narrative, female narrator, feminist literature, Historical Fiction, Iris Chase, John Dos Passos influence, labor movement in fiction, Laura Chase, layered storytelling, literary feminism, literary scrapbook technique, Lizard Men of Xenor, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Atwood novel analysis, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Metafiction, narrative voice transformation, narrative within a narrative, Port Ticonderoga Ontario, postmodern literature, pulp fiction romance, science fiction elements, The Blind Assassin, The Blind Assassin analysis, The Blind Assassin themes, women and memory, women’s writing