The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood? I think most people that take an interest in "the novel" have heard of this Canadian writer. I had, but well, I think I had placed her in the books for the ladies category. Nothing sexist in it, I think it was the way her books were portrayed, the titles and the covers, they just seemed, feminine. But, when with her tenth novel and 38th book, The Blind Assassin, Atwood won the Booker Prize, my interest was peaked and so when the paperback made the half price list on Amazon, I duly purchased the book and then realised it was a hefty tome of some 641 pages. I embarked on this read some 4 weeks ago and as I normally get through one or two ...  Read the complete review

I’m reading Margaret Atwood’s book ‘the handmaid’s tale’ in my English literature and have of my own accord read a few other of her books, this being the latest. I found in Macro at the bargain price of £3.49 instead of its RRP £7.99. It was worth every penny if my 5 stars haven’t given that away. It’s a long novel as they go at around 637 pages long, but this is good. It is full of realistic and lovable characters that you grow to like and feel for. There are many chapters to the story that are broken up into 15 main sub sections. Margaret Atwood has a habit of jumping from story to story in her books and this ...  Read the complete review

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood is a difficult book to categorise. It works on a dizzying number of levels: A historical novel, depicting an industrial and social milieu in early twentieth century Canada; a complex and shadowy love story; as a study of the symbolism of science fiction, or as a story of women and men and the secrets that bind them. It is the story of two sisters, Iris and Laura, who grow up in provincial Canada, daughters of a wealthy man who runs a button-making factory. The novel opens with a description of Laura's apparent suicide after WW2, and then Iris takes over as narrator, trying to understand and unravel the threads of ...  Read the complete review

"Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with." Clear? Hardly, probably. We all idealise goodness, don't we? Goodness as the ultimate antidote to that evil which dominates the world. Goodness which saves us all from the futility of life. We've all subscribed, at one point or other, to this point of view - probably. After all, entire philosophies revolve around the inherent superiority of goodness. So what are we to make of the above quote? It is, of course, taken from "The Blind Assassin", the ...  Read the complete review

Maybe it's been fashionable for a while now to write with a multiple perspective, but Atwood does it as well as anyone I've read. It's not the first time for her either - The Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace, The Robber Bride and others all have elements of the "story within a story". In The Blind Assassin, the conceit is taken to the extreme. The first layer is of course Atwood's telling of the tale she's called "The Blind Assassin". Within that there are several more stories. Two are being told by Iris, an aging ex-socialite and once a darling of Canada's elite. She narrates both her first-person present day story ...  Read the complete review