“An elderly woman reconstructs the suspicious death of her sister, decades after the publication of the controversial novel-within-a-novel that bears the title The Blind Assassin.”
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The Blind Assassin is Margaret Atwood's 2000 novel, the Booker Prize winner and the most structurally ambitious novel in Atwood's catalog. Iris Chase Griffen, in her eighties and ailing, is writing the true story of her sister Laura's 1945 death (Laura drove her car off a bridge ten days after the end of WWII) for her estranged granddaughter Sabrina. Around Iris's first-person memoir, Atwood interleaves the text of the 1947 novel The Blind Assassin attributed to Laura: the chapters of a love affair between an unnamed wealthy woman and an unnamed Marxist pulp writer, punctuated by the science-fiction stories the writer tells the woman in the cheap hotel rooms where they meet.
The structural genius of the novel is the way the triple nesting (Iris's memoir, the 1947 novel, the pulp-SF stories within the 1947 novel) becomes legible as one story across the 521 pages. Atwood is doing the trick The English Patient does on a smaller scale: building a narrative that resolves the questions of who is who and what they actually meant to each other through accumulation rather than revelation. The Port Ticonderoga, Ontario setting is rendered as the small Canadian industrial town it is. The Toronto chapters in the middle quarter are some of the strongest period-Toronto prose any major Canadian novelist has written.
Recommended as canonical Atwood reading, as one of the great twenty-first century novels-within-novels (Possession is the obvious cousin), and for readers who liked The Handmaid's Tale but want Atwood in her literary-fiction mode. Four solid stars. The Margot Dionne audiobook is excellent.
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