Iris Chase Griffen tells a straightforward, first-person story of her life and that of her sister Laura. An unhappy story, it includes her sister’s suicide, Iris’s marriage of convenience with the rich industrialist Richard Griffen, Iris’s separation from Richard and Richard’s death shortly after, and Richard’s manipulative sister Winifred’s successful efforts to remove Iris’s child Aimee and her granddaughter Sabrina from Iris’s care.
Another story, told in the third person, details the clandestine love affair of Iris with a Marxist activist, Alex Thomas, who supports himself by writing science fiction for pulp magazines, and who tells to Iris an elaborate science fiction tale involving a blind assassin during their trysts. Alex’s story and its accompanying trysts, but with an unnamed woman and man, are the content of a novel called The Blind Assassin, that Iris has published under Laura’s name, several years after Laura’s death.
The Blind Assassin is also a mystery, and in fact received the Dashiell Hammett award from the Crime Writers Association in addition to winning the Booker Prize. The circumstances of Laura’s death and Richard’s are not made clear until late in the book, nor is it clear until then why Iris has published a book about her own experiences as if they were Laura’s.
Iris remarks about halfway through the book, perhaps disingenuously, that “the only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you write will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself.” Atwood’s writing often surprises and delights. Set pieces can be found throughout the book. Iris’s disillusioned reading of “Kubla Khan” is an example.
The sacred river….flows to the lifeless ocean, because that’s where all things that are alive end up. The lover is a demon-lover because he isn’t there. The sunny pleasure-dome has caves of ice because that’s what pleasure-domes have—after a while they become very cold….The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
A longer set piece is Iris’s description early in the book, but written when she is old and near death, of getting up and getting going in the morning. Atwood was scarcely sixty when she wrote it, and it is too long to quote, but it demonstrates her power of inhabiting her characters, including the fey Laura, the practical, evil Richard Griffen—worthy of the creators of Babbitt and Gradgrind but a more subtle portrait—and finally the nursemaid/housekeeper Rennie, who prevents an appallingly dysfunctional family from flying to pieces for decades.
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