The Blind Assassin
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Hulu recently released the final season of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and while they kinda ran the story into the ground, the original premise really wowed me. I’ve thought highly of Margaret Atwood since reading The Handmaid’s Tale and am impressed that she’s able to keep the story going in innovative ways, like her spinoff The Testaments published three decades later.
The Blind Assassin is a totally separate tale, but I went into it with reverence. This is a novel within a novel within a novel. Yes– three novels. Woof! Atwood deftly weaves in and out of all three. I was never confused about what thread I was reading; however, it was sometimes hard to follow what she was getting at. As in, it seemed pretty clear that she was writing in figurative terms, but I wasn’t always sure what the metaphor meant. Sometimes, I would re-read a sentence and feel like I had shit for brains.
The primary novel centers on a woman named Iris Chase in her old age, reflecting on her life. She is aware of her many frailties and is both wittily self-depricating and forlornly regretful of the legacy leading up to her present circumstances. Much of her past is colored by a salacious book published by her sister, Laura Chase, which is the second novel embedded in The Blind Assassin. Readers are exposed to the novel itself, and one of the protagonists is a pulp science fiction author, so we get excerpts of that writing as well. Three for one, baby!
You know when you can tell that the author is having a lil fun with their own book? I sense this with Atwood here. She’s bobbing and weaving and exploring the different voices that are on the table for her, with so many threads running parallel. It’s a fundamentally sad, heavy book (Iris is not an uplifting figure, nor am I particularly empathetic to her plight) but Atwood injects such creative depth that I often forgot how much of a true bummer it is.
The Blind Assassin won the Booker Prize as a result of Atwood’s artistry, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t find it painfully dull at times. At 520 pages, it’s filled with a significant amount of superfluous clutter. If anything, I could have gone for more of the wacky pulp science fiction and less of Iris’ sad girl vibes. Still, I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and I enjoyed the exposure to Atwood’s writing outside of the world of Gilead. It receives 3 out of 5 flames.
