Dave's Book Blog: "The Blind Assassin" by Margaret Atwood

Thursday, 5 January 2023

"The Blind Assassin" by Margaret Atwood

Ten days after the second world war ended, Laura (who became a famous novelist posthumously) drove off a bridge. Shortly afterwards her brother-in-law is found dead. Decades later, his wife, Laura's sister (named Iris, in an acknowledged tribute to the role Iris plays in the death of Dido as recounted in the Aeneid) writes her memoirs.

The book is made of three main narrative strands (interspersed with occasional newspaper articles): the present day in which the old woman describes herself and her declining health and her intention to create a record of what happened, the memoirs themselves going back to the time the sisters were little, and the repeated visits of an unnamed woman to an unnamed man during which they make love and he tells her a speculative fiction fantasy about a Blind Assassin and a voiceless slave girl (another unsubtle metaphor; the Assassin lost his sight through overwork and the female cannot speak for herself). Of course, the challenge is to correctly identify this couple and to work out why Laura committed suicide.

The book is superb in its evocation of the sisters' childhood and even better at the description of the perils and tribulations of old age. There are a huge number of thought-provoking asides. Where it is less successful is in the antagonists: Richard and his formidable sister Winifred, a pair of pantomime villains with no discernible redeeming features. And, in the end, I was uncertain as to why Laura committed suicide: was it bereavement, sibling jealousy or the feeling that she had been betrayed (though one could argue that she had been doing her fair share of betraying)? Since the whole book has been written to provide an explanation for the suicide, my uncertainty is problematic.

Nevertheless, there is a great deal to treasure. It is beautifully written and the careful interweaving of the narratives is masterful. It won the Booker Prize in 2000 and was nominated for the Women's Prize in Fiction in 2001. But it's not my favourite Atwood.

For all its current following, the original reviews were mixed. The New York Times called it "overlong and badly written" (I can't agree with 'badly written'), the Guardian asserted that "it falls short of making the emotional impact that its suggestive and slippery plot at times promises."

Pacing:

The love interest in the main 'memoir' narrative is introduced one-third of the way through.
The narrator gets engaged to the villain at 44%
The affair comes to an end at 70%

Selected quotes:

There are wonderful descriptions:

"The orange tulips are coming out, crumpled and raggedy like the stragglers from some returning army." (III: The silver box)
"The summer heat has come in earnest, settling down over the town like cream soup. ... The paper is damp under my fingers, the words I write feather at the edges like lipstick on an aging mouth. Just climbing the stairs I sprout a thin moustache of sweat." (III: The button factory)
"Under the street lights my foreshortened shadow slid before me like a goblin." (V: The fur coat)
"Her face is a blur, like a pigeon smashing into glass." (V: The tango)
"The pen is heavy, hard to push, like a nail scratching on cement." (VII: Xanadu)

There are characters summed up in a single line:

"He doesn't know everything, though that would be news to him." (III: The button factory)
"He's a man for whom chewing is a form of thinking." (VII: The eggshell hat)
"They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as if they'd covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills." (V: The tango)
"She held the hoops, others jumped through them." (VIII: Xanadu)
"His nurse, a chemical redhead with a mouth that flaps at both ends." (IX: The laundry)

There are other insights into life:

"She had her reasons. Not that they were ever the same as anybody else's reasons. She was completely ruthless in that way." (I: The bridge)
"Then the school chaplain offered a prayer, lecturing God on the many unprecedented challenges that face today's young people. God must have heard this sort of thing before, he's probably as bored with it as the rest of us." (III: The presentation)
"As close to suicide as damn is to swearing" (III: The presentation)
"Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble naturally you'd call on him, as with lawyers; but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble." (III: The button factory)
"The nineteenth-century type of Medusa, with a lovely impervious gaze, the snakes writhing up out of her head like anguished thoughts." (III: Avilion)
"Thousands have drowned. Global warming is held accountable: people must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won't stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual." (III: The gramophone)
"He was still a gentleman in his own view, or he held on to the shreds of the costume." (III: The gramophone)
"Candle stubs have been found, and burned spoons, and the odd throwaway needle. ... Vice is everywhere, it seems. Et in Arcadia Ego." (V: The button factory picnic)
"You don't teach boys to be charming. It makes people think they are devious." (V: The Arcadian court)
"Never any paintings called Men Washing Socks in Sink." (V: The Blind Assassin : Street walk)
"After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body's final trick is simply to absent itself." (VII: The eggshell hat)
"My job was to open my legs and shut my mouth." (VII: Xanadu)
"Things have gone pretty far when you've come to feel that it's your utensils that are taking care of you and not the other way around." (IX: The laundry)
"Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of purgatory? And how do you tell the difference?" (IX: The Water Nixie)
"But why bother about the end of the world? It's the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown." (XII: Home fires)
"Overnight, whole portions of what had previously been acknowledged as reality simply vanished. This is what happens when there's a war." (XII: Home fires)