Book #72: The Blind Assassin

Book #72: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

January 31, 2014


This has been a bit of an overwhelming week for me. The least of my stress stems from my job. Although I work in a somewhat unconventional environment, and I have students with some very serious issues, I haven't felt a whole lot of job-related stress this past school year. This week had some challenges; the facility that treats the students is taking on more young men, and we had two new students to contend with today alone. Our last few new students haven't been the easiest to deal with, so I'm apprehensive about the upcoming onslaught of new ones who will be coming in in the next couple of months. But I work with very competent people who have experienced many changes in the facility's programming, and have weathered through, so I will follow their lead and trust that we'll make it through all right. I've found, in my few years of teaching so far, that when I've been faced with challenges, I've always done well to keep calm, step back, and think out a decent solution. It's served me well.

The bulk of my stress comes from the fact that my semester of grad school is officially underway. I'm doing an independent study (which actually ought to be very interesting, and my adviser will be allowing me to structure that to be as relevant to me as possible), and a teaching of writing course. The writing course is going to take up more of my time than I anticipated. I breezed through a similar course in my undergrad days, but with all of the readings and projects that we're expected to complete, I'm feeling a little freaked out. I went to the bookstore where my instructor had ordered the (many) books for our class (not the university's official bookstore, but some independent bookstore near the campus), I found only one that I needed; the rest had sold out. But now that I've had a little time to, again, step back and think things out, I'm feeling much more sure of myself. I got this. I can do this...even if I have to fake my way through some of it (hey, it's worked for me before).

Why do I mention all of this? Well, for one thing, I know that for a time now, I'm going to have to really be disciplined about sitting down and doing my reading. Even though I'm only doing this blog, and reading all of these books, for myself, I think it's just as important as the courses that I'm taking, and almost as important as my job itself. I think I've said it on this blog before: I'm never sorry when I take the time to read. When I waste time watching TV or whatever, definitely...but reading is never a waste of my time, even if a book is less than spectacular.

This is the second book I've read by Atwood; the first is probably her best known, The Handmaid's Tale. I read this during my student teaching, as it was a book that my mentor wanted me to teach to her (or, essentially, my) women's literature course. I found the premise that Atwood set up to be fascinating, but I was nagged by the fact that the world's population has been steadily growing, to a dangerous degree, and that a slowing down in the birth rate wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing...the world might secretly welcome it. The group of girls who read this book absolutely hated, and I was amused as I listened to their reasoning. They weren't very sophisticated readers, these girls, and they found the descriptions of sex to be too much. People are so conservative in Phoenix.

The Blind Assassin is grounded a bit more in reality; the most fantastic elements come from a story-within-a-novel (which was within this novel...meta) about a dystopian society on an alien planet, on which a young former slave (the "blind assassin" of the title...not at all a prominent character in the large scheme of the text) falls in love with a young girl who is set for sacrifice as their city is about to be invaded and destroyed. This story is started by a young, unnamed man (at least not in The Blind Assassin, the novella believed to have been written by the late Laura Chase), and he's telling it to his lover, who is unnamed in "Laura's" book but is really Iris, Laura's older sister and the actual author of the famous book.

Okay, so the plot sounds pretty convoluted, but over 524 pages it's not exactly confusing. Iris's novella (which she'd had published after Laura's suicide) is told in full in the book, intermingled with news stories related to Iris and Laura's family, the prominent Chases of Port Ticonderoga, which is somewhere in Canada. Atwood herself is Canadian; I don't feel like I've read much literature that takes place in Canada. Through Atwood's eyes, Canada isn't much different from the U.S.; the histories are even pretty similar, as the bulk of the story being told (as Iris, writing a memoir to be left for her friend Myra, or for her estranged granddaughter Sabrina) takes place during the Depression, and into World War II. The economy forces Norval Chase, Iris and Laura's famous, one-eyed war hero of a father, to close down his button factory (and other factories). Iris and Laura had been raised in isolation on their estate, Avilion. They were sneered at and despised by their poorer neighbors, and the children of the people who worked for their father. Iris and Laura only ever really had each other...and Reenie, their housekeeper (Myra's mother).

Laura, who is posthumously revered by the book that people believed she wrote before killing herself (which probably made the book much more famous than it would have been on its own, to be perfectly honest), was a strange one. As she was described as being so literal, so pious, so unflinching, so God-loving yet questioning, I had a feeling that she couldn't have written a story about a woman who is sleeping with an outlaw. Though she herself was in love with the outlaw in question; one Alex Thomas, a Communist who was accused of starting a fire and a riot at their father's button factory. They had met him, and been charmed by him, at a picnic. Laura, though four years younger than Iris, had known that they'd both fallen in love with him that day. She was so weird and so wise; I found myself thinking at one point that she might be called "autistic" today. I don't know. I admired Laura for being so brave and stubborn, and for being able to see the truth. Iris, her sister, didn't seem to have such insight or ability.

When the Chase factories failed, Norval Chase essentially sold his oldest daughter off to a greedy social climber, Richard Griffen. Iris came to learn that the Griffens (consisting of Richard and his sister Winifred, who is married though no husband is ever mentioned) were tolerated for their money, though Richard did eventually make a name for himself in politics in Toronto. Laura sees Richard as the monster who killed her father; they'd become business partners, than Richard had married Iris and had closed the factories in Port Ticonderoga. While Iris was on her honeymoon, her father drank himself to death. Though Laura's view on the situation might seem a bit extreme, she wasn't quite wrong.

Iris never felt like she belonged in her situation. Winifred was insincere, and later vindictive when Iris sneakily used her book to get revenge on her husband. When Laura comes to stay with Iris and Richard, Richard molests her...it was done at least once, on the boat the Water Nixie back in Avilion. That's the book on which Richard later kills himself. Laura slept with Richard to protect Alex Thomas; Richard had threatened to sniff him out and have him arrested, though it's uncertain whether or not he actually had any information on him. Laura got pregnant, she was sent away secretly, and Iris (pregnant with Alex Thomas's child; she finds him in Toronto one day on the streets, and they have an affair; the only details of this are in "Laura's" book) didn't know the truth until Laura returned years later. Even after everything Laura has been through, she holds out hope that she can be with Alex. When she finds out that he's dead (not that her sister had an affair with him, but that he died and she got the telegraph), she steals Iris's car and runs it off the bridge.

At that point in Iris's recollections, it hadn't been confirmed that she had herself written The Blind Assassin. But by the time she describes finding out about Laura's death, I think, if Laura had written it about Iris and Alex (because I had figured out long before then that the book was about them, and not about Laura and Alex, or any other combination), that's not possible...she'd only just found out about their affair. Iris does confirm it herself. She does this for Sabrina, not for any fame or fortune herself; though she'd had money at some point in her life, she's not very wealthy when she's old, at least not in the sense that she has much to leave when she dies. So it's assumed that she never got much money for her successful book, and she allows dead Laura to have the fame and the admiration. Their relationship was so much easier to understand once I figured out that Iris had written the book. In a way, I almost felt that Iris was giving the affair with Alex to Laura. Aimee, Iris's very confused and troubled daughter, had been sort of right; she was the baby of the two people in The Blind Assassin, but her true mother wasn't Aunt Laura after all. Iris believes that sharing the truth with Sabrina, who probably knew her own mother's version of the truth all her life, will help her granddaughter to make a fresh start, to be able to shape her own identity.

But in a way, Iris shaped her own sister's identity after death. She attributed her own story, a somewhat risque (for the time) story with some foul language (enough to cause a stir at the time), to her sister. It completely changed the way that people viewed Laura Chase. The Blind Assassin didn't really represent Laura at all. Laura, on her own, was a pretty unique, but very troubled, person. I don't know if I can agree with Iris putting Laura's name on the book; not that it was poorly written (I found the actually story of the blind assassin, the one that Alex tells to Iris, and then they disagree about the ending, to be the best part of this book), but it didn't represent what Laura was all about. Laura would have left with Alex; she would not have kept coming around in her expensive clothes, drawing attention when Alex was trying to deflect it. Well, it's not like it was represented as being autobiographical, but the fact that it was published after the supposed author's suicide had obviously led some people to that idea (including Richard, it seems; he killed himself not because Iris had another man's child, but because he believed Laura really had written the book about herself; he'd loved her in a perverse way). Right or wrong, I can sympathize with Iris. She always tried to do what was right; I don't necessarily see the issue with her sleeping with Alex, because I knew that Richard was an asshole (I could see him raping Laura from a mile off, that wasn't a surprise) and that he was only using the Chase sisters to advance socially, as they were an old and established family and the Griffens were not.

I enjoyed the structure of this book. I wasn't always drawn in to Iris's later musings (though that was before I started to put the pieces together), but in spite of the length, I felt like it was paced pretty well. I may read another work by Atwood some time; she's definitely a unique voice, and she's put out quite a number of novels (and even some books for children, according to the list at the end of my electronic edition). There's a small picture of her hanging in my classroom, in fact; she's one of many authors featured on a "great writers" poster that I've had since my first year of teaching, which features the likes of Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling and Salman Rushdie (still haven't read anything by him, by the way...). I think her spot as a "great" author is well deserved. And I'll say this for The Blind Assassin: it got me interested in vintage pulp fiction in a way that Quentin Tarantino never could.