Books
Another gloriously sunny day. The sun less savage than yesterday, thankfully, and to have such clemency weather wise for a bank holiday is not be sneered at.
I have now completed “The Blind Assassin” by Margaret Attwood and will give this book away in the next few days.
The novel is made up of three strands. There are the memoirs of Iris Chase, tracing her progress from prosperous beginnings, daughter of a button factory owner, through a loveless marriage to a plutocrat to a solitary and brooding old age.
There are excerpts from The Blind Assassin, a posthumously published novel which gave Iris's younger sister, Laura, a minor but (thanks to women's studies) enduring reputation. Laura drove off a bridge in 1945, 10 days after the end of the war.
Then there are the pulp science-fiction stories the hero of Laura's book tells his lover in the dingy rooms where they meet. He is a leftist on the run, convenient scapegoat for a factory fire that was presumably an insurance fraud, while she is a prisoner of privilege, sneaking away from her watchers for a few risky hours of pleasure.
Margaret Atwood has three times been shortlisted for the Booker, but her first novel to do so, The Handmaid's Tale in 1986, is still probably her best-known work. That fantasia on the oppression of fertility showed her talent in the area of science fiction, displayed again in The Blind Assassin. The pulp fantasies made up by the nameless hero of Laura's book belong to a disreputable genre, but they are far the most concentrated and resourceful narratives on offer here.
The title of the book - both the one we hold in our hands, and the one that Iris had published after Laura's death - comes from one of his improvised serials, about a planet where children are forced to make carpets until they lose their sight. Then they are recruited as silent killers.
One blind assassin, though, falls in love with the sacrificial virgin he has been sent, as part of a planned coup d'état, to kill. She has had her tongue cut out, as tradition demands, so that she can't disfigure the ritual of her sacrifice with comments of any kind. The heroine of the story-within-a-story finds this tale harsh, although it is an exaggerated account of her own plight, and her lover's: ours also is a planet where the poor are sacrificed to the rich, and where the system continues to find uses for those it has destroyed.
When she asks for a happy story, she gets a story about the impossibility of happiness instead. He tells her about two battle-weary fighters who find themselves on a planet where all their needs are taken care of, by the doting Peach Women of Aa'A, women who grow on trees, on a stem running into the top of their heads, 'picked when ripe by their predecessors'. The moral of the story is that a paradise that you can't get out of can only be hell.
The other parts of Laura's book are less persuasive; it's easier to imagine such a book making a local scandal at the time of publication, with its relative frankness and society-girl author, than being quoted 50 years later.
The truth that emerges is, in fact, eminently neat, in a murder-mystery sort of way. The surprises have the effect of further flattening out the characters and perhaps they could have been less black and white. Apart from these minor quibbles, it is a rollicking good read.
I am now following the novelist on Twitter.
I am reading the Jurgen Habemas book “The Past As Future”, a collection of interviews with Michael Haller on subjects ranging from the Gulf War to the reunification of Germany.
I have now completed “The Blind Assassin” by Margaret Attwood and will give this book away in the next few days.
The novel is made up of three strands. There are the memoirs of Iris Chase, tracing her progress from prosperous beginnings, daughter of a button factory owner, through a loveless marriage to a plutocrat to a solitary and brooding old age.
There are excerpts from The Blind Assassin, a posthumously published novel which gave Iris's younger sister, Laura, a minor but (thanks to women's studies) enduring reputation. Laura drove off a bridge in 1945, 10 days after the end of the war.
Then there are the pulp science-fiction stories the hero of Laura's book tells his lover in the dingy rooms where they meet. He is a leftist on the run, convenient scapegoat for a factory fire that was presumably an insurance fraud, while she is a prisoner of privilege, sneaking away from her watchers for a few risky hours of pleasure.
Margaret Atwood has three times been shortlisted for the Booker, but her first novel to do so, The Handmaid's Tale in 1986, is still probably her best-known work. That fantasia on the oppression of fertility showed her talent in the area of science fiction, displayed again in The Blind Assassin. The pulp fantasies made up by the nameless hero of Laura's book belong to a disreputable genre, but they are far the most concentrated and resourceful narratives on offer here.
The title of the book - both the one we hold in our hands, and the one that Iris had published after Laura's death - comes from one of his improvised serials, about a planet where children are forced to make carpets until they lose their sight. Then they are recruited as silent killers.
One blind assassin, though, falls in love with the sacrificial virgin he has been sent, as part of a planned coup d'état, to kill. She has had her tongue cut out, as tradition demands, so that she can't disfigure the ritual of her sacrifice with comments of any kind. The heroine of the story-within-a-story finds this tale harsh, although it is an exaggerated account of her own plight, and her lover's: ours also is a planet where the poor are sacrificed to the rich, and where the system continues to find uses for those it has destroyed.
When she asks for a happy story, she gets a story about the impossibility of happiness instead. He tells her about two battle-weary fighters who find themselves on a planet where all their needs are taken care of, by the doting Peach Women of Aa'A, women who grow on trees, on a stem running into the top of their heads, 'picked when ripe by their predecessors'. The moral of the story is that a paradise that you can't get out of can only be hell.
The other parts of Laura's book are less persuasive; it's easier to imagine such a book making a local scandal at the time of publication, with its relative frankness and society-girl author, than being quoted 50 years later.
The truth that emerges is, in fact, eminently neat, in a murder-mystery sort of way. The surprises have the effect of further flattening out the characters and perhaps they could have been less black and white. Apart from these minor quibbles, it is a rollicking good read.
I am now following the novelist on Twitter.
I am reading the Jurgen Habemas book “The Past As Future”, a collection of interviews with Michael Haller on subjects ranging from the Gulf War to the reunification of Germany.