We have spent three-quarters of this hefty novel in the company of Iris, inhabiting her orbit as she navigates her memories.
Even the disruptive excerpts from Laura’s novel feel familiar now. We’ve grown comfortable with those two unnamed lovers, and the ceaseless shift of settings (always a new rented or borrowed room). And we’ve learned that he, too, like the novel-writer, is a storyteller, increasingly successful with his soft-paged (i.e. pulpy) science-fiction stories, wherein lizard-bodied aliens outnumber the blind carpet-weaver-assassins.
But adjustments have been required: Iris’s extended honeymoon and her difficulty adjusting to marriage, a death in the family, and Laura’s difficulty adjusting to Iris’s absence. Laura is only fifteen years old, whereas Iris has accepted the offer of marriage (it feels more like an instruction than an offer) from Richard, a businessman whose influence and holdings have recently increased. The sisters now inhabit separate spheres.
Tension steadily builds. Iris feels restricted, even just moving about the city: “I kept to the main streets,” she says: “the more prosperous areas: even within those confines, there were not really very many places where I felt unconstrained.” Laura releases some of her tension by skipping school and keeping secrets. Richard turns to his sister, Winifred (Freddie, he calls her), for her assistance in managing the gaps where the Chase sisters fall short with new roles and expectations.
MARM 2025 PLANS
Launch (November 1)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Death by Clamshell” (November 4)
The Blind Assassin Parts I-IV (November 6)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Freeforall” (November 11)
The Blind Assassin Parts V-VI (November 13)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 15)
Margaret Atwood’s 86th Birthday (November 18)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Metepsychosis” (November 18)
The Blind Assassin Parts VII-IX (November 20)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 22)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Airborne: A Symposium” (November 25)
The Blind Assassin Parts X-XV (November 27)
Wrap-Up (November 30)
Through it all, Iris admits that her perspective is limited, too. She lacks “the talent for overviews; it was as if my eyes were right up against whatever I was supposed to be looking at, and I would come away only with textures: roughness of brick or stone, smoothness of waxed wooden banisters, harshness of mangy fur.”
She sees surfaces, not centres: so, what have we missed?
Just before Part X, she admits that she omits. “You want me to put two and two together,” she says. “But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth.”
And now we know that Iris has been aware of a readership the entire time. We thought that we had fallen into her story, while she was day-dreaming, gathering and sorting her memories.
But she was always aware that she was presenting us with a story. We saw her as a character, but perhaps not as a storyteller.
Question for anyone reading along:
Seeing Iris’ experience of life after her mother’s death and life as a young wife from her perspective arouses our sympathies, but how does her admission of omission change our trust in her now?
Question for anyone:
For their honeymoon, Iris and Richard take a cruise on the Queen Mary, whereas in Laura’s novel The Blind Assassin, the lovers go to the other side of the big city and see shops and everyday folk living a different kind of life…which is your preferred sort of holiday, relaxing but dressing-up for dinner and champagne, or exploring and wearing down the soles of your shoes?
Margaret Atwood
“…I think I’m very positive. I didn’t kill everybody off at the end, you know? Some people do.”
Sixty Minutes Interview, November 9, 2025
That’s a totally awesome quote from Atwood. Ha!
Iris is so hapless vis-a-vis Richard it’s actually difficult for me to sympathize with her. Of course it could be like that, but as a general rule I prefer protagonists who have a bit more oomph than young Iris does. (She becomes a bit more of an active force as she ages–and as the times change.) She’s clearly leaving things out–we accept that, I think–but it does remain a bit obscure whether the things she’s leaving out that occur in the 30s were because she didn’t recognize them at the time or because she didn’t want to recognize them. Richard was a pretty thorough-going villain. How soon does she realize this? I’m not sure.
It feels like there are quite a few references to how disconnected (from reality) Laura appears to others, so many that I started to wonder if that was actually true or whether I was being pushed into accepted that, unthinkingly, out of an unspoken alliance with Iris as the storyteller. Because, for instance, wasn’t it Laura not Iris who suggested (and acted on) sheltering Alex in the attic (whereas we see Iris express hesitation and misgivings as it becomes harder to navigate the risks are either higher or they seem more obvious)? And it’s Laura who throws herself into the creek (well, I trust that was accurate … nothing made me think she was pushed?!) to mess with the balancing of living/dead and bring back their mother. Laura acts. It makes me wonder if Iris wasn’t just trying to feel better about not having acted so decisively (or, at all). It also makes me wonder if Iris told herself, for instance, that anything that happened between Richard and Laura would have involved Laura choosing it. I felt like she was disinterested at first, then disliked the whole situation…I’m not sure how much she directed toward Richard and how much towards Winifred?
Hmmm can I say I prefer both holidays? I think I’d enjoy both experiences for different reasons. Walking around the city is one of my favourite things to do, but I also wouldn’t say no to a trip on the Queen Mary 🙂 As long as I have time to read during both trips
Also, not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but it looks like the quotes included in the flip boxes at the end keep repeating themselves?
Heheh Wouldn’t say ‘no’ to the Queen Mary. Indeed! Do you actually read a lot when you’re on a holiday? I spend a ridiculous amount of time choosing my reading, even just leaving the house for a day, but outside of ordinary A-to-B travelling, I end up staring out windows or eavesdropping on conversations rather than reading. (And not only cuz I’m nosy, I’m also terribly distractible.)
I try to get away and read as much as possible. I literally steal away from people, or I just wake up extra early and read in bed for an hour. I’d rather sacrifice sleep for reading LOL
I have a friend who was just telling me that she wakes up ahead of her family only so that she can watch an episode or two of her current favourite show, and that would be reading time for me too! (But I’m not dissing TV: I love a good series!)
I love a holiday which combines both – days spent tramping or exploring, but with a nice base you can return to and access to fancy stuff in the evenings!
That’s a nice way of looking at it. What’s your favourite fancy? Mine might be linens/pillows…which is a billion miles away from my real life. heh
I’m mostly a homebody so my preferred vacations have me sleeping in my own bed and working in the garden, but sometimes going out on adventures in my own city.
Great quote today!
So definitely NOT the cruise ship then! I wonder whether fewer people choose cruises in 2025 than in 2019: how many of us watched the Covid news of 2020 and felt tha romanticism of a porthole-view decline?
I would never go on a cruise. Cruise ships seem like a special sort of hell in my opinion, not to mention environmental and health hazards! I know a number of people who have gone on cruises since COVID and what happened on cruise ships during the pandemic doesn’t even enter into their minds.
That’s interesting. I don’t know how one could not think of it once you’d pulled out of a harbour. But, then again, I know people who never utter the word ‘Covid’ now either, and loudly declare they have a cold no matter how Covidy their symptoms are, so I guess it’s just a matter of dropping the curtain on a reality you disdain, whether you’re on land or sea. As I do with the laundry and dishes sometimes!
The shift you describe here is so interesting, I’m really tempted to re-read! ‘Admits she omits’ is a wonderful phrase.
Now that Iris has admitted it, I can’t believe that I didn’t see it: of course, a storyteller always directes a reader’s attention. But is Iris only thinking about what would make this a satisfying story for us to hear/read, or is she also (or, more?) concerned about leaving out bits that raise uncomfortable questions about her decisions?
I like how you describe that transition from seeing Iris as a character to seeing her as a storyteller, conscious of her audience and the story she wants to tell. That feels like an important moment. I haven’t read this one, but your updates have me intrigued. Maybe next November!
I wonder if I would remember the story well enough to have a convo in comments next year here; I certainly did NOT remember it twenty-five years later, but I’d like to think I’d remember it just a single year later? Somewhere I read that TBA is the book that’s sold best, next to Handmaid’s.
The marriage is so horrible, Richard is so horrible, that it makes you wonder what Atwood thinks about marriage. I just read a summary to remind me of all the bits I’d forgotten. Over all her books do you think Atwood’s message is just straight feminist: women, don’t rely on men.
But Iris suspects Richard is horrible right from the start; how often do we hear about something nearly-tragic that “happens to” Iris, and we are sympathetic but, then, why she didn’t act. As when child-Laura throws herself into the water, and we hear about Iris having to run way ahead to intercept Laura’s drowning. BUT Iris was supposed to have been watching her sister: how did Laura, so much smaller and vulnerable, get to the edge of the water? What of Married-Iris in the newspaper articles reporting of the lavish and influential events she attends as Mrs. Griffin? I think the articles are intended to provoke questions about whether she wanted status/wealth more than she wwanted hapopiness/love.
The feeling I got was that Iris was so accustomed to being dependent – on father, husband, family retainers – that she was unable to choose anything else. I couldn’t see what Richard got out of the marriage, the business reasons were spurious, because Iris couldn’t, not until we got Laura’s story, and even then I’m not sure Iris saw the connection. Can you tell I struggle with unreliable narrators?
My mum used to try and make me responsible for ‘the boys’, my younger brothers. She never had much luck.
I struggle with them too, and wonder if we feel we struggle in the same way. I don’t think this is a question with an answer: where is the line between human bias (each of us inhabits our own perspective more so than anyone else’s) and the kind of unreliability that gets called out by prof’s/critics/students as belonging to an Unreliable Narrator.
Fair, and I don’t think I would have called out young-Iris in that scene, if there wasn’t a string of examples over time, but it’s not the clearest. I do think we are meant to take note of the pattern: that everyone talked about Laura as flighty and odd, but that Iris kept her own head in the clouds on purpose every bit as often. Agreed, she has inherited a certain passivity. Laura, though, does not seem to have inherited the same tendency (younger, maybe?) so I think we’re to notice that Iris could have done more (and because it’s Iris’s voice, that we are to sense that she feels this too).
Richard got the whole shebang, didn’t he? Sending the patriarch into retreat and alcoholism and despair? Leverage, valuation…but cannibalising, not building, businesses?