The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
September 29th 2006 03:41
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The novel starts with an assortment of newspaper cut outs tracking the deaths and fortunes of one family, interspersed with the beginnings of a novel within the novel called The Blind Assassin. The novel tells of the secret meetings of an adulterous pair and because she asks it, the man in the novel starts weaving a science fiction story about blind assassins for his lover. The novel may have been written by Laura Chase and had acquired notoriety on posthumous publication. Atwood uses blind assassins and other “science fiction” elements as a prop to raise interest in her drab material and the novel’s mystery revelation is that the Blind Assassin was actually written by Iris, Laura’s elder sister. What a breath-taking revelation!
Cut to the present and Iris is over eighty years old and quietly waiting to pass over. Except that, she has lifetime of quietly acquired malice stored within her and won’t go before she has vented out it on paper.
The Chase Girls, Iris and Laura were brought up in relative lavishness by an industrialist father and an adoring mother. It all changes when the father goes to war and comes back as a bitter cripple and the mother is dead. Their factory falls on rough times and the girls provide refuge to a radical called Alex , wanted by the police because he had stoked the strike in the factory and riots in the town.
Margaret Atwood
After being nominated for three or four times, Atwood finally got the Booker Prize for this novel, which is not a very great recommendation. It was also hailed as the first great novel of this century. Is it?
Basically, it is a wet dream of a novel where an industrialist is a paedophile whose motives are not explained because the narrator has never “understood” him but the radical has the required “stamina” to take part in some knee-tremblers with the said industrialist’s wife. Not unlike when in The Robber Bride, Atwood made a toy boy of a war deserter. Calling Tutsis “cockroaches and vermin” allowed Hutus to massacre them, and calling bourgeoisie capitalists “child-lovers” had allowed many social revolutionaries to confiscate their properties and send them to labour farms. I think this insult was originated, though I am not sure, somewhere in 1930s. The novel is basically an attempt to give those pejorative insults a semblance of reality without the need of slightest self-consciousness of a manufactured insult.
As a literary method, Atwood’s style is said to be about stored hysteria. Well, to me it looks more like working too hard on your wet dream which then busts off in a limp climax.
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