Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin

            I read this massive book straight through. A friend advised me not to listen to the audiobook, as I’d planned, because it would be too confusing going back and forth between various times and places and stories. That was good advice! This is a complex tapestry full of lies and double lives.

            Our main character doesn’t even get a name until quite a long ways into the book, so it’s not entirely clear who’s talking in the various sections. I was still not quite sure until near the end which woman was in the assignations. Was it Laura after all? Was it Iris saying that it was Laura to protect herself? Was it Laura covering for Iris? The confusion is bolstered by Iris’s absolute lack of any spine in any other part of the novel. How could a woman with no will power or sense of self or even the strength of character to act manage to meet up with a lover repeatedly?

            I’ve rarely seen a character with so little starch. She literally does nothing. She cares for no one except her lover and her sister, and she’s so blind to her sister that Laura suffers repeated rape for years while they live together in the same house, but Iris doesn’t even suspect. The blind assassin seems to me to be Iris, going through life with her eyes squeezed shut and killing her sister because of it. The only choice that Iris makes is to go along with the arranged marriage in order to save her family, though even then her choice is mere acquiescence. She can manage to evade her oppressive family enough to meet a lover, but can’t do anything else in her life. I found Iris miserable and infuriating, right up until she published that book and ruined her awful husband’s life. Then I was cheering! But that’s her one action.

            Misery seems to be the major focus of the novel. I’m in awe of the writing and the storytelling and every color and nuance, but exhausted by how miserable every single character is, and how miserable they make each other their whole lives. Literary fiction and misery: why? Why is it such a constant? Why so much infidelity, rape, divorce, neglect, and incest? Why are those these mainstays? Why not allow happiness in the midst of all those things? Wouldn’t it be worse for Iris to lose her shadow of a daughter if she absolutely loved the child and was utterly happy with her, instead of barely even noticing her? And older Iris was such a misery that she gets angry at crullers and muffins and people who love her and help take care of her. Why write a character like that?

            I am actually fascinated (and have been for years) by this focus on misery in the modern novel. I started reading William Faulkner in high school and have not stopped wondering since then why the best writers were and are so obsessive about misery to the exclusion of all else. Any victory has to be a Pyrrhic victory. Isn’t there richness in the rest of life, too? I’m puzzled, I admit it.

            Right! What we know and when we know it! I did love this book, even while I was making faces at Iris through the iPad and yelling the thing I once shouted at my scientist sister when she could not sleep but refused to change something so that she could: “Change a variable! That’s what you people do!” I didn’t know who was meeting a lover, who was being told the story of the blind assassin, who was sneaking out of the oppressive house. I really wanted it to be Laura, who got the short end of every possible stick. Of course, we’re told it’s Laura, but it doesn’t feel like Laura, and the person in the blind assassin half of the novel knows things that we know only Iris knows, has read the books that we know only Iris has read. But only Laura has the strength of character to run away and get a job at the fair.

            Another key element we don’t know is that Laura shares Iris’s streak of martyrdom. Iris of course martyrs herself for her family, though uselessly. We know about Laura’s strange delusions and convictions, but I don’t think there’s any hint that she would come up with the belief that silently suffering rape from her brother-in-law would ensure her childhood idol’s safety through the war. That’s, well, insane. Of course when she learns that he has died anyway, that her suffering was for nothing, and that her sister had been sleeping with him for years, her world shatters and she kills herself.

            There’s a crutch that’s sometimes used in television, where if person A would just tell person B something, the whole story would fall apart. There has to be a good reason for person A not to tell person B. A disturbed girl’s deal with God is a pretty shaky foundation for me, especially when it’s combined with her sister’s unbelievable failure to see years and years of abuse right in front of her. If Iris had known what was going on, how would that change things? We would hate her if she did nothing about it—but what could she do? That’s another story entirely, one where Iris is the actor and prime mover. This story as it stands is about vengeance on the man who did it.

            That’s what struck me most about the novel. It’s two intertwined stories, but one is told as vengeance for the other. Iris writes and publishes the blind assassin story to punish her husband for what he did to her sister. She gets to tell the world all about her love, for one thing, but she also gets to reveal the connection to a dangerous Bolshevik, to ruin Richard’s run for office. She can take away the only thing he cares about, as he did to her.

            What wretched lives! I wish the girls had loved paper dolls, or growing flowers, or doing pretty much anything, honestly. Poor Iris and her dead rock garden and her alien baby. And that evil witch, Winifred! I had a great discussion once with a friend about why we sympathize with some characters and not with others. Our take finally was that we care about people who other people care about, or who care about something passionately. In other words, if someone loves or is loved, that’s enough to make me care. Maybe it’s because I thought the woman in the blind assassin story was Laura for most of the novel, but I didn’t see Iris loving or being loved at all. Even then, her secret Bolshevik lover was cruel most of the time and seemed to love her only physically. He never says a kind word. We learn how to feel about characters by how others treat them, in a lot of ways. It shows us how others feel about them and how they accept being treated, which tells you about how they see themselves. 

            And speaking of what we know and when we know it…once I found out that Iris wrote the blind assassin story, suddenly I was sure all over again that it was Laura in it, that Laura was the one meeting with the man all those years, and that Iris just included her own knowledge accidentally. Aha! I want those notebooks to be the record of Laura meeting up with her lover instead. As it should have been. That’s the worst aspect of the story, that Iris got the husband and family (however awful) and the lover, and Laura, who loved him just as much, got nothing. Laura and Iris shared the horrible husband, so why not the romantic lover? Not that he was kind either—he was cruel and crass and selfish, and their meetings were in those awful, squalid rooms, but still.

            Well, it was brilliantly written and absolutely a master class in what we know and when we know it, but in the service of such unhappiness, it’s hard to be thrilled with the results. But what amazing work!