| Review: Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin |
| Reading The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood is a little like opening a set of Russian dolls.
A fiction in a fiction in a fiction in a fiction. There are at least
four being dealt with, maybe more. I should say that Margaret Atwood is my hero. The Edible Woman, Life Before Man, Lady Oracle, but above all Surfacing had real impact on me. Surfacing alone, a nearly perfect novel, allowed me to forgive Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale, a pretty awful one. And I suppose I approach each of her books with the hope of once again finding something as unexpected, as unique, as difficult, as mind-expanding as Surfacing. Maybe that’s not fair. Still, The Blind Assassin was a disappointment. When it comes right down to it, maybe turning out one excellent novel is more than any of us has a right to expect. Tillie Olsen seems content. I know I’d be content if I’d written Tell Me A Riddle. And The Blind Assassin has much to admire. The marvelous details that jump Fort Ticonderoga into reality with its ruined gentility, its underlying odor of blue-collarness and rank reality. The voice of Iris, so truly written she’s more real than half the people you know. The accuracy of the time, an era of haves and have-nots, taken-for-granted paternalism, and, of course, powerless women, that theme that sings through all of Atwood’s work. But The Blind Assassin is not a writing assignment, it’s a novel to be read, and despite its felicities, its overall shape is too unwieldy. Not just dense, puffed. And it keeps you in the dark. And the lesser fiction inside the greater fiction is annoyingly intrusive and unnecessary. If I want to be led astray in my reading, subjected to misleading clues, shielded from discovery until the book is almost read, I could pick up PD James or Agatha Christie. I don’t expect that sort of thing from an Atwood. It puts me off. I don’t like little hints that lead me in the wrong direction – planted falsities, aha … yet another fiction within all those fictions. And about one of those fictions, a fantasy being spun by one character to amuse (though the events are hardly amusing) another: I suppose one could argue that it reflects the goings-on in the greater fiction (maidens with their tongues cut out, etc.) but I didn’t feel the need for it. The story being told by Iris, the narrator, is full enough. I wanted that story and resented the interruptions. After a while, I started skimming the fantasy, then I started skipping it altogether. There is more than one end revelation by the elderly Iris, at least one of which is somewhat unexpected, though this is no O. Henry. But they seemed a little tired. Of little importance to the characters in the story. As though they were placed there for me, the reader, a sort of fulcrum for the book to balance on. But not the right fulcrum. That is still buried in the book. Somehow overlooked. Somehow missed.
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