“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”
This is a reread of Margret Atwood’s Booker Prize winning novel The Blind Assassin, which was published in 2000, a few years after Alias Grace. I first read it after reading The Handmaid’s Tale for a class, and then Oryx and Crake on my own, and while it has some science fiction within the walls of the novel, this was my first realization that Margaret Atwood wrote other kinds of books than science fiction.
The novel is in the form of a few narrative pieces. We have the would-be memoir of an older woman, a member of an old guard Canadian uppercrust family who married a famous businessman turned politician. In the opening narration, Iris Chase tells us about her sister’s death by suicide (driving her car off the road) in the years right after the war. Because Iris is now much older, we can anticipate two narrative threads from here: what led us to this moment, and what happened since. The second narrative piece here is a series of news bulletins, press releases, and other media that gives us official accounts of the story. Finally, we get snippets of an unpublished (well, recently published in the novel’s contemporary) novel written by Laura Chase before she died. The novel tells the story of a man and woman having an affair, speaking almost entirely from bed. In the novel, in a kind of Scheherazade manner, the man invents a science fiction novel to tell the woman, which tells the story perhaps in a better life they could have together. That novel is “The Blind Assassin”.
The novel, which is about who gets to tell a story (like all novels), slowly unveils the answers to all the question the early sections raise, while also telling the story of a certain class stratum in decades surrounding the war in Ontario. Because each of the pieces of the novel is a carefully constructed narrative both within and without the novel, the total effect is gratifying as they slowly form the full story, as much as we can have one.
