Contemporary Reads: The Blind Assassin

After just a few pages, reading The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood turned into a near complusion. The prose just flows and this fantastic and unpredictable stroy of sisters Iris and Laura Chase is seems so effortlessly told.

There is a novel within the novel, entitled also The Blind Assassin about the secret relationship between a science-fiction writer and, we suspect, a married woman. For most of the book, I (and I'm sure most readers) thought this was an autobiographical accout of Laura's life.

The other parts of the book are made up by Iris's account on her life written for the benefit of her long lost grand-daughter, Sabrina, and by the contents of newspaper cuttings which illustrate perfectly what Iris is telling her and us readers.

We learn much about Iris and Laura's life from the upbringing in a rich family and their young adulthoods. How Laura becomes besotted with a young pinko, Alex Thomas, and hides him at the family mansion when he is accused of burning down their factory. We learn about how Iris marries Richard Griffen to solve her family's money troubles. Iris is only 18 at the time and Winifred, an old friend of Richard's, becomes a suffocating and controlling fixure in her life. She soons give her husband a daughter, Aimee. After the death of her father (suicide?), Laura comes to live with her sisters in Toronto. She is soon sent into an institution allegedly suffering from mental problems. She escapes and disappears for a few years.

All along, we sense their is something missing, Iris is keeping something from Sabrina and us. She reveals all, though, in the last sections of the book.

Only when Iris writes about her reunion with her Laura and her subsequent suicide (driving Iris's car off a bridge) on that same day do we find out the truth.

Laura had been living in Halifax all these years and had only come back to Toronto to await Alex's return from fighting in Europe. She explains that she had been pregnant when she was sectioned and had an abortion. All this had been orchestrated by Richard and Winifred. After hearing this, Iris reveals to her, that Alex died in Holland months ago and that she knows as she received a telegraph confirming this. She also reveals that she had been Alex's lover for a long time. At this point Laura makes off with Iris's car and ends up killing herself.

Before that, though, she manages to stop by Iris's house and leaves some note books. When Iris reads the notebooks she realises that Richard had beeded Laura and in fact the baby she had aborted was in fact Richard's. In turn, Iris's dauther Aimee was the issue of her relationship with Alex and not Richard.

Iris longs from her grand-daughter Sabrina to know all this. She has been brought up by Winifred as her mother Aimee was when she was taken away from Iris after her divorce from Richard.

A long family epic full of betrayal, secrets and longing excellently written by one of the most celebrated writers alive.

Other books I have read by the same author: The Robber Bride.