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Book By: Margaret Atwood

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Sales Rank: 7,838; Release Date: September, 2000; Media: Hardcover Features: Bargain Price

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Average Rating: Rating: - Atwood's Best Yet Margaret Atwood, a well-known Canadian poet, novelist, short-story writer, children's writer and editor born in 1939, won this year's Booker Prize for her latest work, The Blind Assassin. It is about time, too - this was her fourth novel nominated for the award. Atwood started writing seriously at the age of sixteen. Now, ten novels later, she has reached a new level of brilliance. The Blind Assassin isn't perfect, but it's breathtakingly close to it. Thomas Mallon from the New York Times called The Blind Assassin "overlong and badly written". Mallon is simply a victim of the initial inaccessibility of Atwood's most recent work. When reading The Blind Assassin, one gets the distinct feeling that it would exist quite happily with or without the reader - Atwood is giving us a glimpse into the complex world she has created. It is not important that the reader understands the book fully: The Blind Assassin is not created for the sake of the reader. Instead, it has a life of its own. It is a piece of artwork, constructed using a brave new style of literary structure. The seeds of this structure can be found in one of Atwood's previous novels - Cat's Eye, and yet The Blind Assassin is ingeniously imaginative and original. The Blind Assassin does not follow the usual patterns - it isn't written chronologically; it moves between the realm of science-fiction and reality; it uses newspaper reports, newsletter articles, stories within stories, and multiple storytellers, to enhance the reader's understanding of the characters and their journeys. Considering that the book is made up of a number of supposedly incongruous elements, The Blind Assassin is remarkably coherent. Somehow, it works. The main story is set in Port Ticonderoga, Canada. It explores the story of the Chase family, owners of the successful, lucrative Button Factory in the area. The Chases have plenty of money - they live in a large, grand house called Avilion, and the daughters of the family, Iris and Laura, are too well off to be allowed to mingle with the poorer children of the neighbourhood. Their mother dies of a miscarriage when they are both young, and their father is a distant, troubled man who takes little interest in his daughters' lives. Their tutors are either useless or tyrannical - certainly not the sort of people they can turn to for love. Reenie, the live-in housemaid, fulfils in part the girls' need for a mother figure, as does Callista, their father's companion. And yet Iris says, "There were only the two of us...on our thorn-encircled island, waiting for rescue; and, on the mainland, everyone else." The main body of the novel is in the form of a memoir, written by Iris. She recalls and explores two factors that led to Laura's suicide, as well as Iris' own unhappiness - the love that she and her sister had for a young man, Alex Thomas; and the loveless marriage that Iris' father forced her into to save his business. The story about the city of Sakiel-Norn, which is intertwined with the main story, needs a good deal of concentration and at least two readings of the book before things start to really make sense. (A few hints for the reader - the literal talk about sacrifice in the city of Sakiel-Norn is linked to the themes of sacrifice in the Chase family's story; and, some of the characters in Laura's novel mirror the characters in Iris' memoir, though perhaps not in the way you'd expect them to). It's best to read The Blind Assassin all in one hit. If you interrupt the flow of the story for a second, you can become quite lost. It's important to follow all of the threads of the different styles and sections simultaneously. So find a spare long weekend, or better yet, call in sick at work until you've finished. The Blind Assassin can be heavy reading, but with a bit of patience, you'll realise it was all worth it. Atwood's appeal is far-reaching, however, many of her fans are women. And yet her books aren't just vehicles for pushing the feminist line. Instead, they are genuine, fascinating explorations into the humanness of her female characters. Katherine Viner from the Age Good Weekend writes that "her work is feminist in a much less literal and more mature sense, in that it features women who are good and bad, neat and messy, normal, damaged, whole, human." In other words, Atwood's characters reflect the diversity and complexity of women in the real world. In The Blind Assassin, Atwood explores issues relevant to women today - the importance of love in marriage, sexuality, motherhood, sisterhood and women's rights. She uses the stories of women in different times and realities to speak to the women of today. Atwood was born into a world still recovering from World War One and the Great Depression, and was alive during the Second World War. Atwood uses these events, and the way they affected people's lives, in The Blind Assassin. She also discusses important issues like global warming, sacrifice, suicide and death, God, and child abuse, to name a few. The book is multitudinous - it covers nearly everything. The Blind Assassin is a must-read for all Atwood fans - it surpasses all of her previous work. If you've never read her books before, find out what you've been missing out on. No reader who enters Atwood's world will leave it unaffected. In fact, if you're anything like this reader, you'll leave it hungry for more. Write on, Margaret Atwood! Rating: - A Sweet Exhiliration The Blind Assassin does not disappoint. Atwood has styled a fully developed novel within a novel, and takes us through a lilting & genteel 30's/40's murder mystery and an elegantly erotic upperclass/lower class tale intertwined with an engaging and ever shifting off-world science fiction story. The Blind Assassin's character development is played out through survival techniques. Self-actualization is borne from denial; what is obvious remains buried deep in the book's psyche. Atwood combines the colloquial cadence of a post WW1 world with the lush fictions from that era & the mannerisms of anticipation inherent in pre-WW2 times. This book is a rare find. Unlike more predictable fiction it suspends real time and space so thoroughly--the reader is likely to travel in a daze connected directly to the storyline long after the last word has been read. Rating: - Long, Long, and needs an editor I listened to this on cassette tape. After the first three tapes I realized that the author was telling a story from the first person way too much. There is a rule in writing good fiction, show not tell. She had to tell a lot since it was first person, but she could have did more showing to make it more interesting. After the third tape, I resolved to listen to the last tape, number eleven, and then pick back up with number four. This was to see if she was going anywhere. She wasn't. I found out that the other tapes were essentially useless. I missed a little plot development, but not much. I'm not going to listen to the other tapes. A good editor would have told her to cut this novel in half, then it might have kept the readers attention. On the plus side, she's a good writer with a good style. I might pick up another of her novels and try again.

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