The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 31 August 2009
by Margaret Atwood
This is a novel that takes us on a journey through the lives of a woman and her sister, women who live among the well-to-do in a town in Canada, but who are, nevertheless, victims of a certain kind of status of women in society, a status we hope, these days, is now obsolete. This is the status of woman as possession of man. The book opens with the announcement of the death of young Laura Chase, a 25-year-old woman who plummets off a bridge into a ravine, a death intentional or not may depend on how you want to see Laura's life in her world. Laura's sister, Iris, reflects now on who Laura was, and who she was, starting way back near the turn of the twentieth century among wealthy button manufacturers in Port Ticonderoga. We are taken through a moving and compelling story of the Chase family fortunes and misfortunes as seen through the eyes of young Iris and younger Laura. In the meantime, we learn that Laura has left behind, after her death, the manuscript of a novel that, once Iris has it published, causes a minor splash in the Canadian literary world, and becomes a cult favorite among lost young souls.
The story of Iris and Laura is interspersed with excerpts from Laura's novel, The Blind Assassin, which depicts a young woman's affair with a scruffy man with an ambiguously criminal past and a talent for inventing strange and sometimes disturbing science-fiction stories. While, of course, these stories are created by Atwood, they are not particularly good or interesting, especially when compared to her narrative of Iris's life, which is otherwise highly textured and engrossing. Laura is an imaginative and troubled girl, deeply hurt by her father's death. Iris glides along, marrying one of her father's business competitors in the hope of improving her father's chances of surviving the depression. She becomes the possession of Richard Griffen and his meddling nasty sister Winifred. Iris is powerless. She lives in an era in which there are few options for a woman to escape intolerable circumstances. This can be frustrating to read for the modern reader, but that, too, is a measure of how much this cultural status for women has become outmoded and even monstrous (though not entirely extinct, to be sure). She is at the mercy of these two schemers, and is molded and formed by Winifred into a zombie-like model of wealthy womanhood. Iris's surrender to this path is frustrating to read. But wait. Now the story of The Blind Assassin begins to parallel that of Iris's life. We begin to question the identities of the characters in Laura's book and whether Iris has carried on a more complex existence than even she leads us to believe as she narrates the story of her own life.
This novel has multiple layers, but is, in the end, a statement about these women and the options available to them in a male-dominated society. As noted above, it has passages of surpassing beauty and compelling texture. It can be frustrating, but there will be readers who find it a damning critique of early twentieth-century sexual politics and others who look for those bits of relevance that remain all around us today.
(For this book, Atwood was awarded the Booker Prize in 2000.)