GREAT NOVEL. Review on Blind Assassin, The - Margaret Atwood

Atwood's Booker Prize-winning novel is a slow and melancholy downward movement, one in which the melancholy becomes cumulative. despite the sad and tragic tone

There are many paths to pure enjoyment present: through the precise, judgmental, drily amusing recollections of the narrator as she recounts her current life and her past life between the world wars; through the intense, intimate, yet almost metaphorical scenes of two lovers connecting, not connecting, reconnecting; through the wonderful pastiche of golden era science fantasy tales featuring mute sacrificial victims, blind child assassins, erotic peach women, deadly lizard men. but despite those paths to enjoyment, each narrative strand is based in despair, in missed opportunities, in moribund ritual, in the end of things.

There is no wish fulfillment available on any level, and the novel's main mystery - although surprising and having a revenge-filled punch at the end - is still such a sad one to contemplate. motivations are revealed, characters you thought you knew become transformed, reversals of fortune happen in the space of a paragraph, and yet what I was left with by the end was a sadness at recognizing the impossibility of true happiness, true love, true fulfillment. well, at least in the world of Blind Assassin!

the novel is bleak. and yet it is beautiful as well, and truly compassionate towards the two women at its heart. the writing itself is, in a word, awesome. i'm not sure there is an English language writer living who can construct so many artful, evocative, poetic passages without sliding into over-writing. time and again I would stop to re-read a phrase or a paragraph just to enjoy the beauty and depth of what was written. nor does Blind Assassin beat the reader down with despair; much of the time I was so absorbed with the careful description of life in port ticonderoga between the wars and with enormously well-developed characters that I was able to not feel as if I was in a boat slowly drifting towards a waterfall. but in the end, that waterfall was there, and the characters and the reader all eventually tumble over. such as sad experience!

ONLY SPOILERS AHEAD:

poor laura chase, the secret and tragic hero of Blind Assassin. a fascinating, frustrating character. by the end, her motivations revealed, it all made so much sense. not a temptress, neither vindictive nor vacant, but simply a person out of place and out of her time. her motivation: to do good, to understand God, to live for herself, to not live in a world of deceit or corruption. I fell in love with her a little bit. but really, she's too deep for me, too strange, too.not for this world.

iris griffen: I was reminded of many things when trying to understand her character: the tunnel-vision of those madly in love, their inability to recognize the thoughts and feelings of others; the frustrating blankness of those who let life carry them along, the placidity that may appear to conceal depth but often is only a symptom of disengagement; and the potential villainy of that passivity, that blankness. this is a woman who thoughtlessly destroys her sister's reason for living, who does nothing when that sister is carted off to an asylum, who rejects the obvious need for love from her daughter, who lets her daughter and granddaughter get carted away from her, whose primary attribute is inaction. until she is, at long last, able to engage in some good old fashioned revenge. Blind Assassin has a pair of truly repulsive villains, but the the reader is not allowed to see inside of them. their motivations remain both shallow and shadowy. but iris griffen is the real deal: a character whose motivations the reader comes to understand, a person whose yearning for love and for redemption and for independence is expressed in no uncertain terms, a woman who is rendered so three-dimensionally that the reader comes to understand almost every part of her, a villain whose passivity allows the destruction of those she should protect.