I know what I should have done this morning. I should have got out of bed, and on my bike, and joined the PROBs group for a cycle ride. I would have really enjoyed it too. But I made the mistake of picking up the book that had been on my bedside table for about three months. Of the six hundred odd pages I had only a hundred left. Why then, if it had taken me this long to creep along for the first five hundred, did I feel the need to plough through the rest in one go, at the expense of my bike ride?
I did make a cursory check on the weather. But I was doing that to give myself an excuse not to go. And once I realised this, when the forecast looked pretty fine and I felt disappointed, I knew that I wanted (needed?) to stay and finish the book.
That’s the thing about decisions sometimes. When you have a real choice, that is. I would have loved the ride. I would have loved the catch up with friends. So I really wasn’t sure what to do. But I guess, the book was getting to its final stages and it called me.
My mate Gail lent it to me ages ago, after going to see Atwood speak at the Liverpool Philharmonic. It’s an old one, originally published in 2000, but Gail was trying to get through some of her novels, to find out more about her writing. I have read quite a few of them myself already: The Handmaid’s Tale; Alias Grace; The MaddAddam Trilogy; Hagseed; The Testaments. But she’s a prolific writer, with several other novels, and shorts stories, poetry and essays. And even though she’s 83, it doesn’t look like she’s retiring any time soon.
The Blind Assassin, when it came out, wasn’t well received by some of the critics. The New York Times called it ‘overlong and badly written’. The Guardian was kinder, could accept her grand intentions but thought it fell ‘short of making the emotional impact that its suggestive and sometimes slippery plot at times promises.’
It is a slippery plot for sure. It begins with a dramatic reveal by the main narrator, Iris. ‘Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.’ From there it moves between Iris’s life now, and her recollections of her past, various newspaper reports and a sub-plot, which seem to be some of the pages of a book that made Laura a celebrated martyr, and which itself contains snippets of a pulp-fiction sci-fi.
I think, however, that I liked it more than those reviewers. I felt like all the pieces were a bit like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, building slowly from around the edges, and getting clearer with each layered placement. I liked the way the character of Iris is drawn, as an old woman, unlike Mr NY Times, who found her ‘more adolescent than geriatric’. I think he missed the point or had not met many old women, because that is exactly my experience of some of the ones that I know. They have reverted to an unfiltered teenage voice, but with the short temper of someone who knows how little time is left.
There are some elements that didn’t quite work for me. Iris is writing her memoirs, supposedly for her granddaughter to read, but her own daughter is a relatively minor character in the saga. She almost seems incidentally there, as an exemplar of generational trauma. And some of the main characters are a little too much like caricatures.
But, despite all that, I did enjoy the book. I liked the history it covers, both ancient (with the sci-fi, ironically) and modern. I liked the layers. I loved the lines, the descriptions are so good that I didn’t skip over them as I usually do in books.
‘The winter’s ice in the Louveteau Gorge is almost gone …The water … hurtles down through the limestone chasms … A violent sound, but soothing, alluring, almost … Only one corpse in the river so far this year.’
‘her mother Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble naturally you’d call on him, as with lawyers; but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble.’
The reason why it has taken so long to read is that life has got in the way of late. It was also a book where I could remember the plot, as it wasn’t over-complicated, so I could take my time with it.
Was it worth missing the bike ride? Overall, yes. I mean, I guessed the reveal before she dropped it in, but it was still satisfying. It’s not her best book, I think Oryx and Crake (from the MaddAddam trilogy) is my favourite, but it is still a good read.
theleadlesspencil 