John Mullan on The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood 

Among the tricks and puzzles, the overwhelming sense of design encourages the reader that there will be answers

John Mullan
Friday 16 August 2013

T

he very construction of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin is puzzle-like. It is made up of four narratives, interleaved with each other. But how do they connect? The encompassing narrative, which begins and ends the novel, is told by Iris Griffen, now in her 80s, who looks back to her early life, and in particular to her teens and young adulthood in the 1930s and 1940s. The daughter of a well-intentioned Canadian businessman, her fate has been sealed by her marriage to her father's business rival, Richard Griffen, an arrangement calculated to rescue the family's failing fortunes. Alternating with sections of her narrative are chapters from a story entitled The Blind Assassin, told in the present tense. Two unnamed lovers pursue a surreptitious affair. The man – some kind of political subversive – is on the run, while the woman has reason to want the relationship to remain secret.

Margaret Atwood

During their meetings we get fragments of a third narrative, a kind of science fiction fable that the man tells the woman. On some distant planet a society believes that its welfare depends upon rituals in which girls are made human sacrifices, killed annually by former slaves whose painstaking work on fine carpets had made them blind. Interspersed among these three narratives are fragments of a fourth, "public" narrative: newspaper and magazine stories of Toronto society in the 1930s and 1940s. There is, we can feel sure, a deus ex machine at work here – an author who, though she does not speak, has arranged and titled and even numbered the novel's parts. The sense of design is our strongest reason for believing that the parts must inform each other.

From the novel's opening sentence we know that there are mysteries to be solved. "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove her car off a bridge". Laura, Iris's closest companion, is studiously unrevealed, her actions a puzzle that is solved only near the very end of the book. And there are other mysteries. In one of the newspaper reports very early in the novel we are told that the predatory Richard, aged 47, has been found dead in his boat. "No foul play is suspected" – the police may not be suspicious, but the reader surely is.

Laura has written a novel called The Blind Assassin, published posthumously. So is that story of the nameless lovers actually a fictionalised account of her own secret affair? She is obsessed with a young radical called Alex, despised as a "red" by Iris's husband and framed for starting a fire that destroys their father's factory. Is he her lover in the story and thus in life? And what of the story of the blind assassin. It must be an allegory for the characters and events of Iris's family saga. In which case, who exactly is the blind assassin? The novel is structured to pose these questions.

We rely on Iris for our answers, but she is in no hurry. Every chapter of her narrative begins in the present tense, returning us to the present time in which she is writing. "The sun is losing altitude; it's dark early now. I write at the kitchen table, indoors." We will not be allowed to lose ourselves in her story, or forget that she is now old. She must tell her tale before she dies, but in her own time; "the pen wavers and rambles". The emphasis on her failing strength makes the reader conscious of his or her anxiety as to whether she will live to answer our questions. She is certainly conscious of our need. "You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together."

As a narrator, Iris is both dogged and reticent. This combination of qualities is enough to signal that the mystery of that opening sentence will be solved. But then Iris puts the reader in the position that she herself has occupied. When she finds that her sister was pregnant when she was a teenager, she asks her who the father was. "If you don't already know, I don't think I can tell you," Laura replies. But Iris does not know.

Iris's own revelation of the secret that she has been withholding is made in conversation with Laura. It is characteristic of the novel's post-modernist trickery that this revelation has a function in the plot, destroying Laura's hopes for Alex even as it clears up the reader's misunderstandings. "I should have bitten my tongue", says Iris – but we had to know.

Iris has her own imagined reader, her estranged granddaughter Sabrina, to whom she reveals the complicated truth about Sabrina's own forebears. The revelation is more like a confirmation of what she should already have inferred. "But you must have known that for some time." This is the narrative point of a puzzle: when we are given the answer it is always one that we should have guessed.

THE GUARDIAN