Review: Atwood, Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin 
by Margaret Atwood
McClelland and Stewart Ltd: Toronto
0-7710-0863-5  2000 521pp
on Amazon:
http://tinyurl.com/rudx8
0385720955  ppbk  August 2001  544pp   10.17 USD

Awaiting the return of an absent grand-daughter, Iris Chase Griffen reviews the events of her long life as she compiles the final pages of her personal memoirs to be left in the old steamer trunk that once held her trousseau alongside her sister's old homework notebooks: Mathematics, Geography, French, History and Latin. Not that they really learned much from their tutors, Miss Violence and Mr. Erskine, but that her confessions belong with the cribbing of Dido's immolation: the heroine engulfed in flames, as Laura catapulted to death off the St. Clair Avenue bridge in Toronto  on May 18, 1945, ten days after the war had ended.

Written in retrospect, Blind Assassin borrows many of the devices that made Cat's Eye an enigmatic haunting novel, capturing the elusive Booker Prize.  Blind Assassin opens in 1998 with the bestowal of the Laura Chase Memorial Award in Creative Writing of two hundred dollars  for the graduating student of Colonel Henry Parkman High School of Port Ticonderoga with the best short story judged by the Alumni Association members. The endowment is made from the estate of the late Winifred Griffen Prior and presented by Iris Chase Griffen, the surviving but aged sister-in-law, in honor of her sister, the noted authoress. The Chase family was well-established before the First World War with thriving commercial interests in the button industry that serviced many enlisted men in their fight for liberty.

 The narrative of Iris Chase opens in 1998, but returns to the decade spanning the Second World War, taking up where Dos Passos left off, but across the border, recalling the strikes and labor unrest following the the Great Depression and the paranoia of the Red Scare.  Atwood effectively employs the techniques of Dos Passos in utilizing sections  subdivided into brief sections creating a panoramic view of the  characters in their social conflicts. Snaking through the book are news briefs and gossip columns, bringing the characters into the camera's eye, allowing us to glimpse the busy socialite life of the leading characters through the pages of Mayfair magazine and Toronto Star, just as they themselves would want to be seen, appearing at annual balls and ladies' luncheons, preening the feathers in their caps and trailing their dresses across manicured lawns as peacocks on parade.  The more intimate aspects of their hidden lives are taken up in the personal memoirs of Iris Chase as she recalls past conversations and subdued hints of her husband's manipulations. Fantasy, however, is best left within the pages of the pulpy cheap science fiction magazines with the war of the Zycronites and the Xenonians in the siege of Sakiel Norn.

Burning with irony, Atwood enjoys a joke, employing her protagonist as an author hidden behind a pseudonym.  She asks what every writer does:

 
"For whom am I writing this? For myself? I think not." (p43)

 Obviously she knew upon entering the task of publishing yet another novel that it would be read while she was still alive and most likely read several times more after she is dead, analyzed and dissected by literary crib sheets and study guides. Playing with her paper protege, she describes techniques bandied about the writers' newsgroups: giving characters letters in the development of a plot and assigning names later, moving the figures about as chessmen on the board while the opponent placed on defensive tries to second guess the next move. No doubt, two hundred dollars for a writing prize is scanty money to be called an endowment for a winning short story coming from Margaret Atwood. The war of Sakiel-Norn is told first as a love story, but edited differently when it is published later.

 "The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read..." (p283)

 With  invaluable advice, Iris charts the progress of the book, providing insights to author's frustrations with publication and the belated satisfaction of success to be interpreted in more than one way.

 "When the book came out, there was at first silence. It was quite a small book, after all, and hardly best-seller material; and although well received in critical circles in New York and London, it didn't make much of a splash up here, not initially. Then the moralists grabbed hold of it, and the pulpit-thumpers and local biddies got into the act, and the uproar began. Once the corpse flies had made the connection--Laura was Richard Griffen's dead sister-in-law-they were all over the story like a rash. Richard had, by that time, his store of political enemies. Innuendo began to flow." (p510)

Like W Somerset Maugham in reverse, Atwood has a little story to tell, ever so well, of corporate intrigue, power takeovers, blackmail and scandals related to the violations of the fifteen forbidden sexual relationships. Playing with three against two, using similar devices as found in Cat's Eye, she sets her characters in fierce contention, exposing betrayal and treachery through devious means of a pulp writer's pen. The motif of a triptych reappears, this time in the form of a tinted photograph of two young ladies and a man at a community picnic, duplicated and cut in two. The motif of a bridge reappears, but with reverse connotations. Elaine crossed her bridge both physically and metaphorically to arrive safely on the other side. When she descends into the ravine, she also ascends, crossing through the abyss in a coma to revive reborn a new person in defiance of Cordelia and her friends whereas Laura drives through the blockade on St Clair to plunge in a fiery death. True, she does survive the catastrophic accident, but only as a ghost of conscience that drives Richard Griffen to his grave.

Convincing in its sharp black and white detailed stills of newspaper accounts, time is anchored through the sporadic clips as Iris recalls bits of family history, piecing together the mysterious circumstances of her sister's sudden disappearance and equally sudden reappearance nearly eight years later. Laura was seventeen when she was interned at Bella Vista. Eight years silence is unexplained. The war is over. Alex Thomas is dead. His death announced by impersonal war telegram for the next-of-kin. Through the figures recorded in the Mathematics notebook, Iris deciphers the manipulative nature of her husband and his sister Winifred, but too late.

Calculating, manipulative, scheming are all adjectives which describe the author of Blind Assassin. Take your pick. If you live with two tigers in a cage, there's a possibility of becoming a tiger yourself or being swallowed up as a mouse.