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What it argues
The Blind Assassin won the Man Booker Prize in 2000 and is arguably Atwood's most formally intricate novel. It opens with the announcement that Iris Chase's sister Laura died driving off a bridge shortly after the end of World War Two, and the question of whether that death was an accident or suicide hangs over everything that follows. The main narrative is Iris's memoir, written in her eighties in a small Ontario town where she is slowly dying, but the novel contains two other embedded narratives: a pulp science fiction story told by unnamed lovers in secret meetings, and newspaper clippings, society column entries, and other fragments from the period.
The science fiction story — in which a blind assassin on an alien world falls in love with a sacrificed mute girl — is the novel's most unexpected element. It appears as a posthumously published novel attributed to Laura Chase, and it becomes clear as the novel progresses that the story is actually about the secret affair between Iris and her lover, Alex Thomas, a left-wing activist her wealthy family disapproves of. The layers of narrative folding back on themselves — who wrote what, who knew what, who survived and who didn't — is what the novel is building toward, and the final revelation reshapes everything you've read.
What it gets right
- 1.
The novel's central structural revelation — who actually wrote the pulp novel attributed to Laura — reframes every scene involving the sisters and changes what you understand about Iris's entire life.
- 2.
Atwood uses genre fiction as a formal device: the pulp science fiction sections operate as a space where the lovers can speak truth they cannot speak anywhere else, which is what genre fiction has always been for.
- 3.
Iris's memoir is not straightforwardly reliable — she withholds information, misdirects the reader, and constructs herself as somewhat more innocent than she is. The reader's job is to notice what she doesn't say.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist and one of the most celebrated writers in the English language. Her novels include Cat's Eye, Alias Grace, The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Testaments (Booker Prize, 2019). She has written poetry collections, short fiction, and critical essays. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has received numerous honorary degrees. The Blind Assassin, published in 2000, won the Man Booker Prize and is considered one of her most formally ambitious achievements, combining realist historical fiction, embedded pulp science fiction, and an unreliable aging narrator into a single intricate structure.
