'Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.' Thus begins THE BLIND ASSASSIN, Margaret Atwood's stunning new novel. Laura Chase's older sister Iris, married at eighteen to a politically prominent Industrialist but now poor and eighty-two, is living in Port Ticonderoga, a town dominated by their once-prosperous family before the First War. While coping with her unreliable body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister's tragic death. Chief among these was the publication of THE BLIND ASSASSIN, a novel which earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following: as Iris says, she herself lives 'in the long shadow cast by Laura'. Sexually explicit for its time, THE BLIND ASSASSIN describes a risky affair in the turbulent thirties between a wealthy young woman and a man on the run. During their secret meetings in rented rooms, the lovers concoct a pulp fantasy set on the Planet Zycron. As the invented story twists through love and sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real one, as events in both move closer to war and catastrophe.
By turns lyrical, outrageous, formidable, compelling and funny, this is a novel filled with deep humour and dark drama. It is Margaret Atwood at her breathtaking best.
This is slow-going and meandering; at first, I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to really get into it. But as the story-within-a-story-within-a-story unfolds, the details of sisters Iris and Laura's entangled interwar lives become compelling. The novel within a novel, published two years after Laura's death, slowly becomes a part of the main novel in fascinating ways. Slowly, we are led to the conclusion that the "novel", as such, is an important part of the story the octogenarian Iris recounts. Then, we have to wonder about the origin of the novel - or, more to the point, about who the self-insert character truly is. (That I figured out far ahead of the reveal that it was not Laura who wrote the novel wasn't disappointing; instead, it was satisfying in how subtle yet effective the hints were.) And that begs the revelation that Iris's life story, true to her promise, is incomplete, that she has, in fact, left out huge swathes of information that would ordinarily be considered narratively important. An interesting, ambitious novel that plays around with the very structure of its genre to thought-provoking and stirring ends.
