Product Description

Laura Chase's older sister Iris, married at eighteen to a politically prominent industrialist but now poor and eighty-two, is living in Port Ticonderoga, a town dominated by their once-prosperous family before the First War. While coping with her unreliable body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister's tragic death. Chief among these was the publication of The Blind Assassin, a novel which earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following. Sexually explicit for its time, The Blind Assassin describes a risky affair in the turbulent thirties between a wealthy young woman and a man on the run. During their secret meetings in rented rooms, the lovers concoct a pulp fantasy set on Planet Zycron. As the invented story twists through love and sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real one; while events in both move closer to war and catastrophe. By turns lyrical, outrageous, formidable, compelling and funny, this is a novel filled with deep humour and dark drama.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7104 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 656 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward," writes Margaret Atwood, towards the end of her impressive and complex new novel, The Blind Assassin. It's a melancholic account of why writers write--and readers read--and one that frames the different lives told through this book. The Blind Assassin is (at least) two novels. At the end of her life, Iris Griffen takes up her pen to record the secret history of her family, the romantic melodrama of its decline and fall between the two World Wars. Conjuring a world of prosperity and misery, marriage and loneliness, the central enigma of Iris's tale is the death of her sister, Laura Chase, who "drove a car off a bridge" at the end of the Second World War. Suicide or accident? The story gradually unfolds, interspersed with sketches of Iris's present-day life--confined by age and ill-health--and a second novel, The Blind Assassin by Laura Chase. Allowing a glimpse into a clandestine love affair between a privileged young woman and a radical "agitator" on the run, this version of The Blind Assassin is an overt act of seduction: the exchange of sex and story about an imaginary world of Sakiel-Norn (a play with the potential, and convention, of fantasy and sci-fi).

With the intelligence, subtlety and remarkable characterisation associated with Atwood's writing (from her first novel, The Edible Woman through to the best-selling Alias Grace), these two stories play with one another--sustaining an uncertainty about who has done what to who and why to the very end of this compelling book. --Vicky Lebeau

Review
** 'Atwood has never written with more flair and versatility than in this multidimensional novel. A brilliant accomplishment' SUNDAY TIMES ** 'This is Margaret Atwood at her remarkable best.' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH ** 'Margaret Atwood is one of the most brilliant and unpredictable novelists alive.' LITERARY REVIEW ** 'THE BLIND ASSASSIN may indeed prove to be that most elusive of literary unicorns: the woman's novel.' NEW STATESMAN

'The Blind Assassin' is the title of Margaret Atwood's 15th novel; it is also the title of the cult novel written by one of its characters, Laura Chase, posthumously published by her sister Iris. As you might guess from this, Atwood's novel is about how stories console us, and mislead us. It is also about the crimes wrought, consciously and unconsciously, by Love. Laura's death is a mystery that keeps us tantalized for over 500 pages - but is it accident, suicide or murder? This rich and marvellous novel is, like Alias Grace, partly a thriller, but its complex layers explore capitalism and communism, sisterhood and betrayal, life and art. Iris the narrator dilates and contracts as she tells us about the Chase family, whose rise and fall is spread out for the better part of a century. The Chase sisters' girlhood under the care of the redoubtable Reenie is one of the best things Atwood has ever written. Iris is forced into learning the ways of the world, but Laura is the moral touchstone of the novel, at once funny and tragic. Interwoven with Iris's narrative are hilarious extracts from newspapers of the time, describing the life of the Canadian haute bourgeoisie, and the altogether darker passages from The Blind Assassin, in which a wealthy young woman has a passionate love affair with a Communist man on the run. Their assignations are spiced by the science fiction stories he tells her - which, cruel, crude and exotic, she clings to as hope and sanity collapse. 'It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward,' Iris tells us - but it's also Atwood's sublime prose which transforms the pulp SF story, the thriller and the family saga into art. Reviewed by Amanda Craig. Editor's Note: Amanda Craig is the author of In a Dark Wood. Marina Warner says of The Blind Assassin: It's a short three years since Alias Grace, and unbelievably, Atwood has produced another tour de force of psychological insight and storytelling. This novel's more self-consciously writerly, and, in interesting ways, more challenging: Atwood has cunningly nested a book-within-a book-within-a-book in a flourishing display of styles, and the novel resonates with the evident glee the author had in her dexterity. She's parodied sci-fi comics of the 1920s, out of Poe via H P Lovecraft, embedded these sinister and hilarious fantasies in an account of a sulphurous love affair (borrowed pink towels, smoke-filled hotel rooms, dodgy parts of town), and at the same created a richly detailed, characteristically tough-minded study of the aspiring bourgeoisie of provincial, colonial Canada and the coming of the new men and the new money. The novel prickles with Atwood's usual wit (and even malice), but she strikes deep, unexpected notes of empathy and even gentleness as she untangles the lives and rivalrous love of the two sisters at the heart of the book, Iris and Laura Chase. Atwood goes from strength to strength: I liked The Blind Assassin better than any of her books, and I've long admired her. (Kirkus UK)

LITERARY REVIEW
'Margaret Atwood is one of the most brilliant and unpredictable novelists alive.'

Customer Reviews

From Buttons to Bestsellers
This is a tricky one. There's no doubting Atwood's ability as a writer; her prose is consistently elegant (although I do have a few reservations about some incongruous vernacular, such as the repeated use of the word "nicked" when describing theft, but perhaps I'm being picky), and her descriptive powers are notable. The problem I have with this work is that it lacks synergy. Quite the opposite is in fact the case, with the whole falling short of the sum of the parts.

As a dynastic record, following the ups and downs of the prominent Canadian family at the book's core, the novel works well in an episodic way. The two sister's lives are chronicled with wit and poignancy. There is, however, a good deal of predictability to their fates. This is the story of a privileged family behaving in a manner to which most readers will be accustomed. Because of this familiarity the novel as a whole is not as successful as it might have been. There's much to recommend this book but there could have been so much more.

As an overall package this book warrants three stars, but, due to the high quality of the writing it earns four.

Blindingly beautiful
The Blind Assassin is spellbinding, haunting and bewitching. Atwood's gloriously conrolled use of poignant and delicate prose encapsulates love, passion and loss throughout three time periods with a true understanding of the human spirit which makes for a timeless and unforgetable piece of literature.
Not since Guy de Maupassant has an author managed to so untterly captivate my imagination and utterly absorb me into their imaginings. Atwood's intricately constructed narrative weaves seamlessly in and out of time and landscape involving the reader so intensely it is almost disappointing when the story finally reaches it's powerfully emotional conclusion. The novel is not only readable, it is hard not to be 'read' back by it; the characters are not only so beautifully defined as to be believed but are also so real as to be empathised with.
I was sorry to finish this book, it left me breathless and moved in a way that few others before have managed and deserves to become a 'classic' in every sense of the word.

An enduring masterpiece
Sometimes, when reading a big book, one gets the feeling that the author set out to achieve size, as if that in itself might suggest certain adjectives from a reader or reviewer - weighty, significant, deep, serious, complex, extensive, perhaps. Sometimes - rarely, in fact - one reads a big book and becomes lost in its size, lost in the sense that one ceases to notice the hundreds passing by, as the work creates its own time, defines its own experience, shares its own world. Even then, reaching the end can often be merely trite, just a running out of steam, the process thoroughly engaging, the product, however, something of a let down. Rarely, very rarely indeed, one reads a big book that actually needs its size, justifies itself, continues to surprise as well as enchant and then, finally, stuns. Margaret Atwood's Blind Assassin is such a book, a giant in every sense, a masterpiece beyond question.

Blind Assassin was awarded the Booker prize in 2000 and charts intersecting histories of two well-to-do Canadian families, Chase and Griffen. The two Chase sisters, Iris and Laura, are quite different people. Born into the relative opulence of a Canadian manufacturing family, they have a private education of sorts, experienced throughout and yet alongside something vaguely like a childhood. Various aspects of twentieth century history impinge upon their lives and eventually force their family to reassess its status. Economic downturn, war and family tragedy take their toll on the father, who becomes less able to manage either his own life or his business. Something has to give. Ways of coping must be found.

Iris, the elder sister, is the first person narrator of about half of the book, the other half being devoted to a book within a book, a novel in the name of Laura, the younger sister. This novel, entitled The Blind Assassin, is an eclectic mix of experience, sex, fantasy and politics. It has made a name for Laura and retains a significant cult following many years after its publication. Laura, herself, died in a car accident. She drove off a bridge into a ravine. The car belonged to Iris. There was never any real explanation for the event.

Iris, meanwhile, has been married off to an older man, a Griffen, who seems to treat her like so much chattel. But then he is an industrialist with the wherewithal, not to mention capital, to assist the bride's family business in its time of need. Iris, therefore, experiences the Canadian equivalent of an arranged marriage. Perhaps the word marriage is a little overstated. The partnership could be better described as a merger, or a union, if that were not a dirty word because of its political connotation.

And so the octogenarian Iris, clearly anticipating the end of her days, embarks upon a cathartic outpouring of personal and family history in the hope that an estranged granddaughter might just understand a little about other peoples' motives.

The book takes us through Canada and north America, across to Europe, via an imagined universe, to political commitment, direct action and its inevitable reaction. Iris needs to write it all down. And so she works her story out, constructing it, perhaps reconstructing it, maybe inventing it from memory and relived experience against a backdrop of contemporary Canada and her own failing health. Her vulnerability, in the end, is our debt, our penance, perhaps. She is a wise old woman with much to hide, but her acerbic wit is undiminished by age, her observations of others stunningly perspicacious.

It is not often that a novel, a mere flight of another's fancy, achieves the subtle, stunning and surely enduring power of the Blind Assassin.