The mysteries of love

The Blind Assassin
By Margaret Atwood
Doubleday Books, 521 pages
Available at National Book Store

These days, nothing is quite what it seems, either in life or in fiction. We live in an age of tell-all memoirs; where public figures we thought we recognized turn out to be wife-beaters, victims, overeaters and undereaters. Everything is up for grabs or for sale, including the fiction genre.

Enter Margaret Atwood, with her dense but rewarding novel-within-a-novel, The Blind Assassin. In it, Iris Chase, heir to a Toronto button empire (daddy owns a button factory during wartime), tells about the events leading up to the death by drowning of her younger sister Laura. Through newspaper and magazine clippings, the haunted narrative of the older sister and the chapters of a novel titled The Blind Assassin, we finally come to put all the pieces together, in a work that gains resonance only by the last two or three chapters.

The delayed payoff is not unusual for what is essentially a mystery novel. Readers must inhabit several realities in The Blind Assassin: that of Iris Chase, a possibly unreliable narrator who looks back over the clues of Laura’s death from the cagey confines of old age; that of the media, which recounts key events in the Chase family saga; and the reality presented in The Blind Assassin (the novel within the novel, supposedly written by Laura), which veers into a science fiction subplot, giving us yet another layer of meaning to unravel.

The cover of Atwood’s novel recalls 1940s dimestore mysteries, and there is something of that genre in The Blind Assassin. Classic noir situations arise: a mysterious man arrives, changing forever the lives of two women. A woman drives a car over a bridge and drowns, and readers wait patiently for the truth to bob to the surface. (Then there’s the ‘40s noir film Laura, about the mysterious death of a mysterious beauty.)

But Atwood mixes and crosses genres willfully, borrowing meanings from both mystery and science fiction, as well as half a dozen more literary genres. It all falls together finally, though it takes a while to get there. This marks Atwood’s return to science fiction (after The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye), if only in a subplot. Like many writers, Atwood seems to recognize the vitality and metaphysical possibilities inherent in what has often been regarded as an inferior genre. The characters in The Blind Assassin parody the science-fiction world, its conventions and predictable situations, only to point up its more sublime qualities.

What will it be then? he says. Dinner jackets and romance, or shipwrecks on a barren coast? You can have your pick: jungles, tropical islands, mountains. Or another dimension of space – that’s what I’m best at.

Another dimension of space? Oh really!

Don’t scoff, it’s a useful address. Anything you like can happen there. Spaceships and skin-tight uniforms, ray guns. Martians with the bodies of giant squids, that sort of thing.

You choose, she says. You’re the professional.

At the heart of the novel-within is a spy-tinged romance, with space a metaphor for escape, the one thing two lovers want most of all. Beyond the bubble of this imagined novel, there is Iris’s account, full of regret and weary wisdom. Iris is one of Atwood’s finer creations: layered with physical details, prone to wry observations on modern life and the decay of grammar – an old woman who is flawed in ways we only begin to understand clearly by the end of the book. (In the interests of mystery, I won’t give too much away.)

Laura, meanwhile, is depicted as a mystical, if somewhat naïve, youth whose legend escalates after her death with the publication of The Blind Assassin. Critics pluck her short novel from obscurity, claiming the influence of Carson McCullers and Elizabeth Smart on her writing. Academics tout her as a feminine heroine, trapped in a bourgeois world. All of this amuses Iris, who knows Laura never bothered reading such things.

Another layer added to the tale is an historical one: Toronto during the buildup to World War II, the effects of labor unrest and communism on wealthy families. One needs to know a little about the Red Scare to fully enjoy The Blind Assassin, though it’s not essential to the story. In fact, the historical stuff seems a little tacked-on, as though Atwood wanted to lend the story greater impact, a la Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.

Laura turns out to be a bit of a McGuffin, too. (According to Alfred Hitchcock, a McGuffin is a device or object that seems to be more essential to a story’s plot than it actually is.) But she does serve an important literary role: the embodiment of the enigmatic female.

For my money, I would have preferred to read the novel-within separately, on its own merits. It’s actually more fun than the more numerous chapters devoted to Iris. But it’s essential to the work’s overall texture to intersperse the single chapters throughout The Blind Assassin, kind of like a parallel universe unfolding before the reader. I won’t say Atwood’s use of this device is groundbreaking, though it is very deft and well-executed.

What seems most important to Atwood is how social forces shape women’s lives. Whether through arranged marriages, lives of servitude, or institutionalization, women in Atwood’s world have a pretty tough lot. And that doesn’t count the misery they bring upon themselves in the pursuit of love.

And the title? It refers to the story told within the story within the story, and it asks all the right questions about love, commitment, and indeterminate endings.