Margaret Atwood / The Blind Assassin / Speak, memory

Margaret Atwood

THE BLIND ASSASSIN

Speak, memory

John Mullan analyses The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. Week one: recollection

John Mullan
Saturday 8 November 2003

H

ow good is your memory? Probably not as good as that of most narrators of novels told in the first person. Those who professionally deal with testimonies - detectives, say, or criminal lawyers - must find extraordinary the exactitude of recollection in such works of fiction. Robinson Crusoe, looking back some 40 years later, can tell us that, when washed up on his desert island, he saw no sign of his shipmates "except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows". Exactly so. Jane Eyre, supposedly writing years afterwards, recalls pages of precise and passionate dialogue with Mr Rochester. Doubt her record and the fiction crumbles.

Charlotte Brontë, like many other writers, relies on a convention that contradicts experience. We might remember a phrase or emphasis from a recent conversation, but we are unlikely to recall the exact words said to us, or by us, even minutes ago. Yet novels with first-person narrators invariably behave as if the narrator could replay a tape of dialogue. Iris Griffen, the main narrator of The Blind Assassin , reaches back decades to remember what was once said. She is in her 80s, and is telling the story of her and her sister Laura's entwined lives. Even the most recent event in her narrative - Laura's suicide - took place half a century earlier. Yet she gives us not just telling episodes, but also the dialogues that accompanied them.

Aged nine, she hid with Laura under the kitchen table and overheard the cook discussing their mother's recent miscarriage with a friend:

"'Did she have a lot of pain?' asked Mrs Hillcoate, in a pitying, interested voice.

"'I've seen worse,' said Reenie. 'Thank God for small mercies. It slipped out just like a kitten, but I have to say she bled buckets.'"

And so on. The mixture of platitude and frankness is completely credible, and even as the conversation continues ("'Some women shouldn't marry,' said Mrs Hillcoate") the fact of recollection becomes credible too. Reenie's precise words lodged, for Iris remembers how she and Laura later sneaked upstairs to try to find "the kitten".

Yet Atwood's narrator does not have consistent recall. There are novels, like Robinson Crusoe or Jane Eyre , that simply require us to suspend disbelief about the narrator's memory, but The Blind Assassin does not. Some times Iris doubts her recollections. When she tells us how Alex, the rebellious young man whom she and Laura shelter from the police, suddenly kissed her, she wonders if she did something to provoke him: "Nothing I can recall, but is what I remember the same thing as what actually happened?" Her own wedding is a blur. "Speeches were made, of which I remember nothing. Did we dance? I believe so." Often she cannot produce the telling detail, or remember exact words.

"Where am I?" she asks more than once as she turns from the present to resume her story. Almost every chapter of her narration makes visible the gap between the recent and the distant. She is writing to the moment, week by week, noting the changing weather, the slow turn of the seasons. In the present, this narrator worries about what she has recollected. "I've looked back over what I've set down so far, and it seems inadequate." We are to believe in that inadequacy.

Above all, Atwood cleverly sets the passages of remembered dialogue against prevailing silence. Iris recalls a particular conversation with her father, but this is one of the few times that any words of his are remembered. She tells you exactly what her despicable husband, Richard, said when she found out that he had destroyed telegrams telling her of her father's death, but little else that he says is recorded (though there is much indirect reporting of the gist or the effect of something that he has said). The commands of his baleful sister Winifred are summarised, but only the narrator's first ever, horrible conversation with her is transcribed.

Recollection in Atwood's novel is eloquently uneven. What matters is exactly the difference between what is remembered and what is not. It is a kind of dramatic convention that earns our belief. The conversations that have been picked out from the past acquire a special energy because they are edged by silence or forgetting.

THE GUARDIAN