Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the Booker Prize 2000,
The Blind Assassin is a spellbinding novel that spans the decades between the First World War and the present, offering the sweep of an epic and the intimate focus of a family drama.
For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious.
The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a- novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist.
Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms and clichés of the 1930s and 1940s, The Blind Assassin is a richly layered and uniquely rewarding experience. The novel has many threads and a series of events that follow one another at a breathtaking pace. As everything comes together, readers will discover that the story Atwood is telling is not only what it seems to be—but, in fact, much more.
About the Author
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939, and grew up in northern Quebec and Ontario, and later in Toronto. She has lived in numerous cities in Canada, the U.S., and Europe.
She is the author of more than forty books — novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism, social history, and books for children. Atwoods work is acclaimed internationally and has been published around the world. Her novels include The Handmaids Tale and Cats Eye — both shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Robber Bride, winner of the Trillium Book Award and a finalist for the Governor Generals Award; Alias Grace, winner of the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, and a finalist for the Governor Generals Award, the Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize and a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and Oryx and Crake, a finalist for The Giller Prize, the Governor Generals Award, the Orange Prize, and the Man Booker Prize. Her most recent books of fiction are The Penelopiad, The Tent, and Moral Disorder. She is the recipient of numerous honours, such as The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in the U.K., the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature in the U.S., Le Chevalier dans lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and she was the first winner of the London Literary Prize. She has received honorary degrees from universities across Canada, and one from Oxford University in England.
Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.
From the Hardcover edition.
Reading Group Guide
1. Discuss the intricate structure of this novel and the methods Atwood used to construct it.
2. Atwood writes in three different forms in The Blind Assassin: memoir (Iris's telling of her story), fiction (Laura's novel), and science fiction (the story within that novel). Comment on the similarities and differences of these forms as shown in this novel.
3. In the science fiction story, we're told that it is a saying among the child slave carpet weavers that "only the blind are free" (p. 22). Discuss this and its significance to the title of the novel.
4. Iris notes, "Some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling" (p. 2). Who howls loudest and longest in this novel and why?
5. Water, rivers, ice, rock gardens, rain, snow, trees-the natural world plays an important role in this novel. Talk about these images and their meanings.
6. Discuss the significance of keys, locks, and doors in the different parts of the novel.
7. Discuss those moments where the story flashes forward with information that you don't realize will be key until later. How does this heighten the suspense? Discuss other moments of discovery, of epiphany. Are they the same for all readers?
8. Talk about the theme of betrayal and guilt in this novel. Has everybody in this novel betrayed somebody?
9. The story of the Depression, the Red scare, and the upsurge of union activity in Canada are all key parts of this novel. Discuss the merging of the personal and the political in the Chase family and in the novel by Laura Chase.
10. About the readers of Laura's novel, Iris says: "They wanted to finger the real people in it...They wanted real bodies, to fit onto the bodies conjured up for them by words" (p. 40). Are readers inclined to try to match a work of fiction with an author's life? Discuss the danger in doing so, as evidenced in this novel.
11. In this book, the role of mothering often falls on women who are not, technically, mothers. Discuss the different ways that Reenie and Winifred fill that role. Discuss missing mothers as a theme in the novel.
12. We see Iris in this novel as a young girl, a young woman, an old woman. Talk about the different ways you feel toward her at different points in her life.
13. Laura paints Iris's face blue in a photograph because, she says, Iris is "asleep" (p. 195). Do you agree? Does Iris wake up? How?
14. Of their father, Laura tells Iris, "He didn't try hard enough-Don't you remember what he used to say? That we'd been left on his hands, as if we were some kind of a smear" (p. 383). Discuss Norval Chase's role in the book-his relationship with his brothers, his wife, his daughters, his button-factory workers.
15. Is there anything redeeming about Richard? Who fared worst at his hand?
16. Iris says that "The living bird is not its labeled bones" (p. 395). Talk about the writer's challenge to deliver truth. Does the truth reside in what's left out?
17. Discuss the significance of color, or the absence of it, in the novel.