Atonement
Ian McEwan's novel is also written by an old woman about her sister, and its last pages also reveal who wrote the story you have been reading.
Read our takeThe Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood's Booker Prize winner: an old woman in a small Canadian town finally tells the truth about her sister, who drove off a bridge in 1945.
- 2000
- 521
- Elegiac
- Wry
- Melancholy
- voice-driven
- dark
- funny
About Margaret Atwood
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeThe Blind Assassin won the Booker Prize in 2000.[1] Iris Chase Griffen, aged 82 and poor, living in the town of Port Ticonderoga, sets down the story of her family and of her younger sister, Laura.[1] Laura died in 1945 and became famous for a scandalous novel published after her death.[2] Chapters of that novel, in which two secret lovers invent a pulp story about a blind killer on another planet, run alongside Iris's account.[2]
The story, in more detail
The first line tells the reader how Laura died. Ten days after the war ended, she drove a car off a bridge that was being repaired, straight through the Danger sign.[3] A policeman comes to tell Iris, because the car was hers. Two witnesses say Laura turned the wheel on purpose, and they noticed her hands because of the white gloves she was wearing.[3]
Iris tells the policeman it was an accident and that her sister was never a good driver. Privately she thinks Laura had her reasons. Upstairs, she finds a bundle of cheap school exercise books that Laura hid in her stocking drawer that morning.[3]
The book then moves between several kinds of writing. Iris's memoir, written in old age, is the main thread. Between its chapters come pieces of Laura's novel, also called The Blind Assassin, in which an unnamed man and a married woman meet in parks and cheap rooms. To keep her coming back, he tells her a science-fiction story in instalments.[2][4] Newspaper clippings report deaths, weddings and speeches in the family.[4]
One clipping, from The Globe and Mail of June 4, 1947, reports that Iris's husband, the industrialist Richard E. Griffen, has been found dead in his sailboat at his summer house, Avilion. The paper says he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and that the police suspect no foul play.[2] Iris writes the whole story for her granddaughter, Sabrina, whom she has not seen in years.[5]
The full plot
Iris, in her eighties and with a weak heart, writes her life story for her granddaughter Sabrina. She tells it out of order, mixing scenes from her present life with the past.[5]
Iris and Laura grow up at Avilion, where their father's button factory is failing. During a strike the factory burns, and the sisters hide Alex Thomas, a union organizer accused of starting the trouble. Iris marries Richard Griffen to save the business. Her father dies while she is on her honeymoon, and Richard hides the telegrams from her.[5][6]
Laura comes to live with Iris and Richard in Toronto. She runs away and is found working at an amusement park, then is expelled from her school.[6] Iris meets Alex again in Toronto and begins an affair with him. She has a daughter, Aimee, and sees Alex's features in the baby. Alex is later killed in the Second World War, and the telegram comes to Iris, because he had listed her as his next of kin.[5]
While Iris is pregnant, Richard and Winifred tell her that Laura has had a breakdown and send her to a clinic called Bella Vista. Iris is not allowed to visit. Winifred says Laura has a delusion that she is pregnant too.[5]
How it ends — spoilers ahead
In May 1945 Laura and Iris meet in a café. Laura says she really was pregnant, and that Richard and Winifred forced her to have an abortion at the clinic. She says she made a bargain to protect Alex. Iris tells her that Alex is dead, and that she had been having an affair with him. Laura takes Iris's bag and car keys, and the next day she drives off the bridge.
Laura's notebooks tell Iris that Richard had been raping Laura for years. Iris leaves him and takes Aimee back to Port Ticonderoga. In 1947 she publishes The Blind Assassin under Laura's name. The last pages reveal that Iris wrote it herself.
The scandal ruins Richard's political career, and he is found dead in his boat. Joan Hope's account for EBSCO calls it suicide. LitCharts adds that Winifred made it look like an accident. Winifred wins custody of Aimee, who grows up troubled and dies young, and then of Sabrina. Iris dies after finishing her story, and Myra's obituary says her granddaughter will settle her affairs.
Themes and analysis
A book inside a book inside a book
The Booker Prize describes the novel as a book within a book within a book. The outer layer is Iris's memoir. Inside it is Laura's novel about the two lovers. Inside that is the story the man tells the woman, set on a planet called Zycron.
Atwood said the form came from early 20th-century collages, in which newspaper cuttings were glued to a canvas and painted around and over. The result held two ways of showing reality, each contradicting the other and also completing it. The novel's newspaper clippings give the public version of the family's weddings and deaths. The publisher's guide notes that they sometimes contradict what the reader has already been told.
The lovers treat the Zycron story as a game. She asks for a desert, tombs and dead women, and he promises to deliver it on the instalment plan, like furniture, so that they will have to meet again. He tells her about a city destroyed so completely that its real name was forgotten, marked only by a pile of stones.
Buttons, the Depression and a marriage arranged to save a factory
Iris and Laura grow up at Avilion, the family house in Port Ticonderoga. Their grandfather built a button factory there in the 1870s. Their mother dies young, and their father, Norval Chase, comes back from the First World War drinking and without his faith. A family servant called Reenie brings the girls up.
The Depression brings strikes to the factory. After a riot, the factory is burned. A young union organizer called Alex Thomas is blamed, and the two sisters hide him in the attic at Avilion.
Norval tells Iris that Richard Griffen, a rich Toronto industrialist much older than she is, will propose. The marriage is supposed to save the factory and provide for Laura. Iris is 18. The publisher's guide asks whether she was only a pawn in a plan made by the men, or had reasons of her own.
The deal fails. Norval dies while the couple are on their honeymoon in Europe, and Richard keeps the news from Iris. The factory closes for good. Richard's sister, Winifred Griffen Prior, has already furnished their new house in Toronto and runs Richard's household affairs.
Iris, the sister who survived
In old age Iris is poor and sharp-tongued, and she mocks the people who try to help her. She complains about her failing body and looks back on a life she admits was far from exemplary. Myra, the daughter of the family servant Reenie, checks on her and fixes things around the house.
Iris describes herself as a person who long ago chose to be upright and contained, like an urn in daylight. Laura is the opposite. Everyone treats her as special, unusual and more sensitive than most. Iris writes that her sister's cruelties were accidental. The guide asks the question the novel keeps returning to: is Iris responsible for Laura's death?
John Updike, reviewing the book in The New Yorker, wrote that scarcely a sentence of Atwood's “quick, dry yet avid prose” fails to do useful work. The reviewer at The Christian Science Monitor compared her wit and realism to Edith Wharton's.
Quotes from The Blind Assassin
Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
The white gloves: a Pontius Pilate gesture. She was washing her hands of me.
But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.
Why we recommend it
A Booker Prize winner
The Blind Assassin won the Booker Prize in 2000, the first of Margaret Atwood's two wins. Time magazine later named it the best novel of the year.
A mystery that plays fair
The first line tells you Laura drove off a bridge. The rest of the book explains why. The opening chapter already mentions Alex, Richard, a bargain and a stack of hidden notebooks.
Iris's voice
The old woman telling the story is funny, rude and unsparing about herself. She is also hiding something, which makes her worth watching.
Canada between the wars
The family story takes in a button factory, a Labour Day picnic, a strike and a riot, and a Toronto society wedding.
What this book explores
The people in its pages
Iris Chase Griffen
The narrator. At 82 she writes the story of her family and of her sister, Laura, for her estranged granddaughter.
Laura Chase
Iris's younger sister, sensitive and strange, who drives a car off a bridge in 1945 and becomes famous for a novel published under her name.
Richard Griffen
A rich Toronto industrialist much older than Iris, who marries her and plans a career in politics.
Alex Thomas
A young union organizer and writer whom the sisters hide in the attic after the factory fire.
Winifred Griffen Prior
Richard's sister, a noted socialite who runs his household and tries to turn Iris into a proper society wife.
Also in the book
Reenie
The family servant who brings up Iris and Laura after their mother dies.
Norval Chase
The sisters' father, owner of the button factory, who came back from the First World War drinking and without his faith.
Myra Sturgess
Reenie's daughter, who looks in on Iris in her old age.
Bring it to book club
- Iris says she chose long ago to be upright and contained. What did that choice cost her, and what did it cost Laura?
- Is Iris responsible for Laura's death? At what point could she have changed what happened?
- What do the newspaper clippings get right about the family, and what do they miss?
- How does the Zycron story told by the lovers mirror the lives of the people telling it?
- Who are the blind assassins of the title? Can you find more than one?
Timeline
2000
The Blind Assassin is published by McClelland & Stewart in Toronto, N.A. Talese in New York and Bloomsbury in London.
2000
The novel wins the Booker Prize, Margaret Atwood's first. Time magazine later names it the best novel of the year.
2001
The novel wins the Dashiell Hammett Award of the International Association of Crime Writers and is shortlisted for the Orange Prize.
2001
Anchor Books publishes the paperback on 28 August. Robert Laffont publishes the French translation, Le tueur aveugle, by Michèle Albaret-Maatsch, in Paris.
2002
The novel is shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Book editions
- Hardcover
- McClelland & Stewart
- 2000
- 9780771008634
- Hardcover
- N.A. Talese
- 2000
- 9780385475723
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Bloomsbury
- 2000
- Paperback
- Anchor Books
- 2001
- 9780385720953
- Paperback
- Robert Laffont
- 2001
- 9782221092811
- Michèle Albaret-Maatsch
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje, another Canadian novelist, shared the Booker Prize in 1992 with a novel built from memory and fragments around the Second World War.
Read our takeAlias Grace
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Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood's previous novel is also narrated by a woman whose account of the past cannot be fully trusted.
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The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood's earlier novel also ends with a document that changes how you read everything before it.
Read our takeThe Blind Assassin: frequently asked questions
What is The Blind Assassin about?
Two sisters from a rich Canadian family. Iris, in her eighties, writes down the truth about her younger sister, Laura, who drove a car off a bridge in 1945. Chapters of a novel published under Laura's name, and old newspaper clippings, run alongside the memoir.
Did The Blind Assassin win the Booker Prize?
Yes, in 2000. Margaret Atwood won the Booker Prize again in 2019, for The Testaments.
What is the story within the story?
The Blind Assassin is also the title of a novel inside the novel. In it, an unnamed man and a married woman meet in secret. He tells her a science-fiction story about a planet called Zycron, a doomed city and a blind killer.
When is The Blind Assassin set?
Iris writes in the late 1990s. Her story goes back to her grandfather's button factory in the 1870s and centres on the 1930s and the Second World War.
Why is the book so hard to follow at first?
The novel switches between four kinds of writing: Iris's memoir, Laura's novel, the science-fiction story inside it, and newspaper clippings. Margaret Atwood said the form came from collages that mix newspaper cuttings and paint.
Is The Blind Assassin a mystery?
Partly. The publisher calls it a mix of gothic suspense, romance and science fiction, and it won a crime-writing prize, the Dashiell Hammett Award, in 2001.
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References
References
The sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document The Blind Assassin, its publication, and its place in literary history.
2abcdThe Blind Assassin: publisher's page, with description, formats and an excerpt (The hard-boiled egg; The Globe and Mail, June 4, 1947; The park bench)
WebsitePenguin Random HouseUsed forPublisher's page. Primary text for a later stretch of the novel, plus the description, reviews and the paperback's current details.
3abcThe Blind Assassin: excerpt, The Bridge (opening chapter), by permission of Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
WebsiteRandom House, 2000Used forPublisher's excerpt of the opening chapter, posted by Random House by permission of Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. Read through the Wayback Machine capture of 17 October 2000.
7The Booker Prize 2000: winner and shortlist
WebsiteThe Booker Prizes, 2000Used forThe Booker Prize's account of the 2000 prize and shortlist, and of Time naming the novel the best of 2000. Read through the Wayback Machine capture of 19 September 2021.
8The Blind Assassin — Library of Congress catalog record for the N.A. Talese first U.S. edition (LCCN 99462109)
ArchiveLibrary of Congress, 2000Used forLibrary of Congress record for the first United States edition: New York, N.A. Talese, 2000, 521 pages.
9The Blind Assassin — Library of Congress catalog record for the McClelland & Stewart edition, Toronto (LCCN 00693237)
ArchiveLibrary of Congress, 2000Used forLibrary of Congress record for the Toronto edition: McClelland & Stewart, 2000, 521 pages.
10Le tueur aveugle (The Blind Assassin), translated from the English (Canada) by Michèle Albaret-Maatsch (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2001) — catalogue record
Official recordBibliothèque nationale de France, 2001Used forBibliothèque nationale de France record for Le tueur aveugle, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2001, translated by Michèle Albaret-Maatsch.
11Awards and Recognitions
Websitemargaretatwood.caUsed forMargaret Atwood's own award list: the Booker Prize in 2000, the Hammett Award and Orange Prize nomination in 2001, and the IMPAC shortlist in 2002.
12Margaret Atwood — Open Library author, work and edition records, used to confirm that every ISBN listed resolves to the book named
ArchiveOpen LibraryUsed forOpen Library edition records, used to confirm that each ISBN listed here resolves to The Blind Assassin.
13The Blind Assassin
NovelMargaret Atwood, 2000Used forThe primary text represented by this page, used for descriptions of the work’s contents and for any quoted passages shown here.
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Why these sources are here
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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