Margaret Atwood's edifice of emptiness

By MARGIE THOMSON deputy books editor

Canadian Margaret Atwood is one of the world's most loved novelists. With a career that has spanned almost four decades she has more than 30 books to her name (poetry, short stories, non-fiction, children's books and 10 novels) and her work has been translated into 33 languages.

Despite three previous nominations for the literary world's Holy Grail, the Booker Prize - for The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Cat's Eye (1988) and Alias Grace (1996) - it has so far eluded her, although she has received many other literary awards and honours.

Atwood may well win this year - we'll know on Wednesday - but it won't bring the same unequivocal satisfaction as if she had won it for any of her other three nominated books. It will be Atwood winning the prize, not necessarily The Blind Assassin (Bloomsbury, $49.95), because this is certainly not the best book she has written.

It's oddly difficult to sort out an appropriate response to it.

Is The Blind Assassin a dark masterpiece, a layering of secrets cleverly revealed via a complex structure in the querulous monotone of the aged and mysteriously implicated narrator?

Or is it simply a rather ordinary tale told over too many pages by an uncharismatic woman whose life echoes with failure and loss?

Of course, we want it to be the former. And we are, as always, beguiled by the writing: there is scarcely a page in which a brilliant metaphor, a beautiful description, or a deeply evocative passage does not make one shake one's head in awe.

But sadly we have to acknowledge that a major problem lies in the voice Atwood has chosen to narrate her story.

In the here and now, 82-year-old Iris Chase Griffen is examining her past, ostensibly in a long letter to her estranged granddaughter, in order to reveal the dark secrets that have lain in her heart for half a century. She tells of the childhood she shared with her sister Laura, growing up as the affluent yet isolated daughters of a small-town Canadian industrialist whose button factory made a fortune in the Great War.

Most of the story takes place in the 1930s through 1945. As the Depression worsens, Laura befriends a communist sympathiser, Alex Thomas, and the girls shelter him after class-based upheavals including the torching of the family's button factory. Both are infatuated with him.

Iris is married off, like the chattel she is, to her father's business rival, Richard Griffen, a cold, hard, politically ambitious man without a shred of empathy.

Laura, an oddball, disturbed yet truth-seeing character, pops in and out of the story until her premature death which both opens and, almost, closes the novel. But we already know she will find a kind of immortality in the fame she receives for her posthumously published romantic potboiler, The Blind Assassin.

The events surrounding Laura's death are the central concern and mystery of the novel.

Interspersed with this story, which flicks back and forth between the 1920s and 1930s, and Iris' mundane, contemporary life in a world gone suburban, is the story of two unnamed lovers who meet in a succession of seedy rooms for sex and whisky followed by an instalment of a dystopian science fiction story which he tells to her. This story-within-a-story is of a blind assassin who falls in love with a mute woman; together they cause the destruction of their city.

There is a lot of death in The Blind Assassin. Atwood briskly and conveniently kills off anyone who might have been able to watch out for Iris and Laura in the brutal social world into which they surface without a life skill between them.

The book opens on a note of death: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge ... Nothing much was left of her but charred smithereens," Iris dispassionately intones.

This lack of living people is just one aspect of the edifice of emptiness Atwood has created. The affluent-class background which places style and money above human emotion or care is empty enough, and we are confirmed in this feeling by the newspaper clippings Atwood inserts throughout the book - society-page articles in which the women are known only by their husbands' names, and for the clothes they wear.

But as if that wasn't enough, she treats us to one of the most chilling marriages it is possible to imagine, a sisterly relationship based almost solely on the fact that neither has anyone else, an affair where love and longing remain unspoken, a mother who doesn't love her child, a father who can't adequately love or understand his daughters, a granddaughter who exists only as a literary device.

A different storyteller might have counterpointed the smooth villainy of Richard Griffen with a rough but timely hero. Alex Thomas, perhaps? Not Atwood, too attuned to life's nastinesses to let her characters off the hook so easily. In The Blind Assassin there is no hero, no truly sympathetic good guy or gal, and no rescue, either.

Of course, you can't blame her for creating such an empty world. She's a novelist, after all, and it's her right. But even Atwood virtually acknowledges the bloodlessness of her creation - in the case of the wicked Richard Griffen, at least. In what seems almost an apology to readers, she has Iris add: "I've failed to convey Richard, in any rounded sense. He remains a cardboard cutout. I know that." The same can be said of all the other characters as well. It's as if their empty forms are given shape only by the clothes they wear.

Iris, whose voice accompanies us for more than 500 pages, remains a slippery customer. It's so hard to get a grip on who and what she is that for much of the story she remains unconvincing. She knows too much for a first-person narrator, to the extent that at one point she even asks herself (as if Atwood herself recognises the improbability): "How do I know all these things?"

Sold into marriage while not much more than a child - 18 - she remains a virtual non-person, a non-motive force in her own life, without real interest, character, generosity or self-knowledge. When the interesting thing about her is finally revealed, well into the book, the story peps up considerably although Iris herself remains uncharismatic right through to the sad, empty ending.

In the end, thank goodness, the book's secrets are revealed - and sordid, sad and all too ordinary they are.

The story ends, as it begins, with a death, but also with Iris' plaintively expressed request for "someone who will see me." Aha. There is certainly a lot of blindness in this story, literal and metaphorical, and always with tragic consequences.

Or, alternatively, the blind assassin could be age itself, or truth, which creeps up and fells all victims indiscriminately unless something or someone else gets there first.

The novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize are: The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood; The Hiding Place, Trezza Azzopardi; The Keepers of Truth, Michael Collins; When We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro; English Passengers, Matthew Kneale; The Deposition of Father McGreevy, Brian O'Doherty.