The Blind Assassin.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood. New York: Doubleday, 2000

The Blind Assassin, by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, is like a funhouse hall of mirrors--full of strange twists, false leads, misleading reflections, and labyrinthine trails that weave in and out of one another in the most intriguing way.

Shortly after the close of World War II Laura Chase, the younger daughter of a formerly prominent Canadian family, drives her sister's car off a bridge. Iris Chase Griffen, Laura's older sister and widow of the wealthy industrialist Richard Griffen, narrates the circumstances that led up to Laura's death in a memoir destined for her estranged granddaughter, Sabrina. In addition, Iris reproduces The Blind Assassin, a novel supposedly written by Laura but actually authored by someone else. (To tell who would spoil the fun.)

Granddaughters of Benjamin Chase, an entrepreneur who made his fortune in buttons and undergarments, Laura and Iris grow up at Avilion, the ancestral home. Benjamin loses two sons in World War I. The third, Norval, inherits Benjamin's thriving business and elegant estate. He marries a fragile society gift who, after producing two daughters, dies in childbirth. Ignored by their father and educated sporadically by incompetent or tyrannical tutors, Iris and Laura learn to rely largely on their own devices. The good-hearted but class-conscious housekeeper Reenie makes sure they maintain a degree of social decorum, but as the girls mature, they grow increasingly devious.

At a company picnic Laura and Iris, still adolescents, meet Alex Thomas, a smooth outsider, who turns out to be a union agitator. These are the years of the Great Depression, and labor unrest is rampant. When the button factory is besieged and nearly burned down, Alex is a prime suspect. The police are after him, but nobody suspects that Laura and Iris are harboring him in their attic at Avilion. Eventually, he flees Canada for Spain to fight in the Civil War. The Blind Assassin, the novel within the novel, relates in detail Laura's sordid affair with Alex. But less evident is the fact that, Iris has been sleeping with him, too.

Depressed by the failure of his business and the betrayal of workers he considered practically kin, Norval marries Iris off to his business rival, Richard Griffen, then quietly drinks himself to death. Richard and his sister, Winifred, adorn the eighteen-year-old Iris in the latest fashions and attempt to transform her into a society...