Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood tells a story within a story within a story. On the first level, Iris Chase, an old woman, remembers her life and her sister Laura’s life up until Laura’s untimely death, since, as we are told in the first sentence of the novel, she drove her car off a bridge ten days after World War II ended. Laura is remembered by people because she left a novel, The Blind Assassin, as a kind of testament, a novel which Iris chose to publish and which some consider scandalous while others revere it as masterpiece.
The Blind Assassin by Laura Chase is the story, whom some suspect is inspired by real events (hence the scandal), of two lovers, a young blonde woman from the upper class and a left-wing activist wanted by the police. The lovers meet in different, more or less sordid hideouts. The man earns money by writing pulp fiction, and like a kind of Scheherazade, entertains his lover with a story he invents for her…
The story invented by the man tells the destruction of Sakiel-Norn, a town located on the planet Zycron. While a horde of barbarians march towards Sakiel-Norn, an assassin, who is blind, (like all assassins in Sakiel-Norn) has a mission: to kill a virgin about to be sacrificed and take her place in order to approach the king and murder him…
While the narration alternates between these three stories (first-person point of view for Iris’s story, third-person narration in Laura’s novel) as well as newspaper clippings, we discover which events led to Laura’s suicide and to Iris’s subsequent disgrace. The various testimonies complete or contradict one another until we see the whole picture at the end. Along with Atwood’s flawless style, and through the characters of Iris and Laura, we discover how easily the line can be blurred between fiction, self-fiction and memoirs.
Just like we witness it in the rewriting of the original Sakiel-Norn story, occurring towards the end of the novel, sometimes the most important part of a story is what is left out of it, its silences, its "blind assassin". But let the reader be reassured: the truth is revealed ultimately, every assumption or suspicion we have will be confirmed or denied at the end. As a matter of fact, I was a little bit disappointed that Atwood felt compelled to be too explicit in the end, when the reader has already made up his mind about what is going on…
I had read two other novels from Margaret Atwood previously, The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, both which I enjoyed immensely, but none of which I would be as close to calling a masterpiece as The Blind Assassin. This novel certainly appeals to lovers of literature, and I have no doubt it might become one day a classic… I am looking forward to reading Oryx and Crake, Atwood’s latest novel…
Rating: 4,5/5
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