The Blind Assassin

Ten days after the war ended, Laura Chase drove a car off a bridge.

That's how Iris Chase Griffen begins her story. The year is 1945. World War II has just concluded, and Laura—Iris's younger sister—is dead at twenty-five. Eyewitnesses told police that Laura had turned the wheel deliberately, "with no more fuss than stepping off a curb." Iris herself suspected suicide, but she lied to the authorities. She told them it was an accident.

Later that same day, Iris found something in her sister's bureau drawer: a stack of cheap school exercise books. Laura's notebooks. As Iris began to read them, she thought of Reenie, the old nursemaid who had tended to the sisters' childhood injuries. "Tell me where it hurts," Reenie would say. "Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where." But Iris reflects that some people "can't ever stop howling."

This opening scene sets everything in motion. But here's the thing about *The Blind Assassin*: it's not just one story. It's three.

The first narrative is Iris's own memoir, written in her old age as she approaches death. She's the last surviving member of the once-wealthy Chase family of Port Ticonderoga, Canada, and she's decided to write an account of her family history—particularly her sister and herself. This frame narrative, interspersed with scenes from Iris's life as an elderly woman, forms the backbone of Margaret Atwood's novel.

The second narrative is a novel-within-a-novel, also called *The Blind Assassin*. Ostensibly written by Laura Chase and published after her death, it tells the story of two unnamed lovers carrying on a secret affair. The woman comes from wealth and privilege; the man is a socialist on the run from the police. Their meetings are furtive, their conversations charged with tension. As their relationship unfolds, the man tells his lover a story—and that story becomes the third narrative.

This third narrative is a science-fiction tale set in the fantastical city of Sakiel-Norn, where blind child slaves are trained as assassins and mute girls are raised for sacrifice. A blind assassin falls in love with the Temple maiden he's supposed to kill, and together they escape the city.

Three stories, nested inside each other like Russian dolls. But here's the central mystery that drives the entire novel: who actually wrote *The Blind Assassin*? And what does it reveal about the Chase sisters' lives?

At first, the structure can be disorienting. The novel cuts back and forth between Iris's memoir, the love affair, and the science-fiction story, with newspaper clippings scattered throughout that provide an "official" version of events. These clippings announce deaths, engagements, and political speeches—but they're almost always wrong about what really happened. The public record, Atwood suggests, is a lie.

As the novel progresses, however, the complexity serves a purpose. Each story mirrors the others. The exploitation of the mute sacrificial girls in Sakiel-Norn echoes the exploitation Iris and Laura suffer in their own lives. The blind assassin who kills without seeing his victims becomes a symbol for the way characters act destructively without understanding the consequences of their actions. And the question of who tells the story—and whose version we believe—becomes the novel's central preoccupation.

Iris is our primary narrator, but she's not entirely reliable. She withholds key information, obscures her own motivations, and only gradually reveals the truth about her past. The novel-within-a-novel, which seems at first to offer a window into Laura's mind, turns out to be simply a variation on Iris's perspective. Even the newspaper articles, which present themselves as objective fact, are grossly misinformed.

So what are we to believe? Who is telling the truth?

The book explores these questions through its themes of memory, fate, and the nature of storytelling. Iris describes writing as a kind of memorial—"a commemoration of wounds endured." But she also admits that her motives aren't entirely pure. She's seeking justice, or perhaps revenge. She's trying to set the record straight, but she's also trying to shape how she'll be remembered.

And then there's Laura. Laura, who believed in absolute truths and spiritual realities. Laura, who took words literally and carried her beliefs to extremes. Laura, who Iris says "couldn't ever stop howling." The novel opens with her death, but her presence haunts every page. The question of what really happened to Laura—and who was responsible—is the thread that pulls us through all three narratives.

The photograph appears in both the prologue and epilogue of Iris's novel. It shows a couple at a picnic: the woman smiling at the man, who holds a hand in front of his face. There's another hand at the photo's edge, "cut by the margin, scissored off at the wrist, resting on the grass as if discarded." The woman examines this photograph whenever she's alone, "as if she's peering into a well or pool—searching beyond her own reflection for something else, something she must have dropped or lost, out of reach but still visible, shimmering like a jewel on sand."

This image captures something essential about the novel itself. We're all peering into the past, searching for a truth that shimmers just out of reach. The stories we tell ourselves about our lives—about our families, our loves, our losses—are never quite the whole truth. There's always something cut off at the edge, something we can't quite see.

But who cut that hand out of the photograph? And why? And what does it mean that the same image appears twice, at the beginning and end of a story that spans decades?

*The Blind Assassin* is a book about memory and betrayal, about the stories we tell and the stories we hide. It's about the weight of family history, the limits of happiness, and the ways we blind ourselves to the consequences of our own actions. Three narratives, nested inside each other, circling around a single question: what really happened between Iris, Laura, and the man they both loved?

The answer, when it comes, will change everything you thought you knew. But first, we have to go back to the beginning—to the Chase family, to the button factory, to the crumbling mansion called Avilion, and to the two sisters who grew up inside its walls, burdened by a legacy they never asked for.

How did Iris and Laura Chase become the women they were? And what does it mean that, in the end, Iris chose to tell her story under her sister's name?