Coming Home to Canada with The Blind Assassin

To grow up in Canada is to grow up with Margaret Atwood. She’s our literary icon, carved into some metaphorical north-of-the-border Mount Rushmore between Wayne Gretzky and Neil Young. She’s also a complicated feminist figure, acid-tongued Twitter user, and most famously, imaginer of dystopian futures that feel more plausible by the day. The woman contains multitudes.

 But, as it turns out, her fame may not travel as far or as fluidly as I imagined. Much like The Tragically Hip and Colm Feore, Atwood is best known in her native Canada. When my fellow book-clubbers proposed that we roam vicariously to my home country this month, I suggested we read Atwood. Their collective response was “Who?” It took an invocation of The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu* to elicit looks of recognition.

So it probably would have been a smart move to begin their education with the book that inspired that series (but I’ve read it), or with Alias Grace (but I just watched the Netflix series), so we started with the Atwood book I happened to spot recently at a used bookshop in Chicago – The Blind Assassin. It proved to be a strange choice for us all.

The Blind Assassin has a structure that The A.V. Club likens to peeling back an onion. The outer layer is Atwood’s story of Iris Griffen, a onetime socialite now old and living in obscurity in her fictional hometown of Port Ticonderoga, Ontario. Within that story are excerpts of a novel about a scandalous mid-century affair that Iris published under her sister Laura’s name. Within that story is a speculative fiction fable about the planet Zycron told as pillow talk from one lover to the other. Story within story within story. And interspersed between all those stories are fictional news articles detailing the activities of the scions of the Chase and Griffin families. It’s a lot, particularly given that just five pages in, I was already rolling my eyes at Atwood’s descriptions of Zycron’s Snilfard nobility and Ynigirod serfs.

But, though it pained me, I persisted. I blasted through the last 200 pages of this 640-page novel within 24 hours, and it made me feel sadder than almost anything I’ve read recently (and not in a good-cathartic-cry A Little Life way). Apart from the Zycron storyline, The Blind Assassin is one of Atwood’s most down-to-earth novels, and the plausibility of its plotline somehow makes her signature cynicism even more melancholy. If we took this book as gospel, we’d have to conclude that life is bleak, often meaningless, and solitary even if you’re surrounded by people you ostensibly love.

One of the consequences of that sadness is that it flattens even central characters to sketches. As a young woman, Iris is blank, indistinct. Her motivations are unknown, her will unexpressed. Why anyone would desire her, befriend her, or even hate her is unclear. Similarly, by her own admission, Iris’ stories of her husband Richard lend him a one-dimensional quality:

“I’ve failed to convey Richard, in any rounded sense. He remains a cardboard cutout. I know that. I can’t truly describe him, I can’t get a precise focus: he’s blurred, like the face in some wet, discarded newspaper.”

Blurred too are Iris’s sister, her father, and even her comparatively animated housekeeper Reenie. For example, the postcards Iris writes to them while on her honeymoon are almost comically banal:

“My postcards were to Laura and to Reenie, and several to Father. The messages I wrote on them were fatuous. To Reenie, The weather is wonderful. I am enjoying it. To Laura: Today, I saw the coliseum, where they used to throw the Christians to the lions. You would have been interested. To Father: I hope you are in good health. Richard sends his regards. This last was not true.”

None of this is an accident. Atwood is too skilled to be unintentionally glib. But I do wonder why she rendered her characters so blandly when her rare descriptions of their feelings were so successful that they practically popped off the page. Some of my favorite such sentences – exploring the nature of tragedy, love, and hate – are below:

“In life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell-burst, the last plummet of the car from the bridge.”

“Once I could walk through blizzards with my hands bare and never feel it.  It’s love or hate or terror, or just plain rage, that can do that for you.”

“She walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they’d loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks.”

“Sometimes she wants to put a match to him, have done with him; finish with that endless, useless longing. At the very least, daily time and the entropy of her own body should take care of it – wear her threadbare, wear her out, erase that place in her brain. But no exorcism has been enough, nor has she tried very hard at it. Exorcism is not what she wants. She wants that terrified bliss, like falling out of an airplane by mistake. She wants his famished look.”

In addition to these potent passages, I thrilled at Atwood’s way with words. She describes a woman’s hair as “tight grey cooked-looking curls like an English barrister’s wig.” She calls a waiter “walrus-faced.” She dismisses a candle as “obese, scented with what appears to be kerosene.” And she sums up the fast food chains of rural Ontario this way: “We passed a few more franchises - smiling chickens offering platters of their own fried body parts, a grinning Mexican wielding tacos.” She’s a master of devastating specificity.

Given its many merits and missteps, you may be wondering whether I liked this book in the end. I didn’t, and neither did the other Vicarious Reading members. Several of them didn’t finish the book at all – a rarity in our completion-obsessed club. Over poutine and smoked meat at Mile End**, each of us shared our respective reasons. Some found the meta-narrative tiresome, others wished for a protagonist who wasn’t so limp, still others thought Atwood could have gotten the point across in 150 fewer pages. As for me, I simply couldn’t shake the sense of despondency that hung over every page. When I finished, all I felt was the relief of being free from its grasp (and joy for the Ferrante book I had waiting on my to-read list!).

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*As an aside, how good is the Season 3 trailer? Offred’s “So move the point” line gave me chills!)

**Readers may wonder why we discussed a book set in Ontario in a Montreal-style deli, to which I reply, “Show me an Ontario-centric restaurant in New York and I’ll do better next time!”