The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

I ran into Margaret Atwood for the first time in an Indian Railways compartment. I was perched up, as usual, on the uppermost berth. In a carriage teeming with hundreds of people, the upper berth is as private as it gets. You just open a book and hide in plain sight. I was doing that, as usual. Only this time I was distracted by the sight of a boy reading a big book. He’d been bewitched by this book since the beginning of the journey, and I could see that he was nearing the end. He trembled slightly but that may have been the train rumbling. When he finally reached the end, he closed the book gently on his lap, and let out this deep, almost visible sigh. I listened to that sigh, and I decided that I was going to read this book, whatever it was. It would have been imprudent to poke him when he was clearly basking in a bookish afterglow, so I scrambled for my glasses for a clearer glimpse of the book cover. My eyes traced the words ‘Blind’, ‘Assassin’ and ‘Margaret’, ‘Atwood’.

Here I am now, 10 years later, sighing the same sigh and devouring Atwood’s wickedly luscious creation.

The story starts on a startling note:

“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”

The narrator is 80-year-old Iris Chase who is looking back and beyond this fateful day of 1945. To deconstruct this day, she will have to piece together the fragments of her life — their lives, in fact, for the lives of the sisters are firmly intertwined.

Laura might have driven off that bridge, but a piece of her lingers in the form of a manuscript. She makes her posthumous debut as an author, and soon attains something of a cult following.

Iris’s book — called The Blind Assassin — chronicles the secret meetings of an unnamed pair of lovers. Theirs is a tale of forbidden love: she is a high society girl, while he is a pulp fiction writer who’s on the run for his political activism. They meet in ramshackle rooms and desolate parks, and exchange stories: she tells him about the world and the shifting political climate, while he concocts tales about extraterrestrial beings and lost civilisations.

One of his stories is about the planet of Zycron and its ruined city, Sakiel-Norn. Legend has it that Sakiel-Norn was once the cradle of Zycronian civilisation, and stories of its wealth and splendour spread far and wide. But the glory of a civilisation is usually built on the blood and bones of the innocent, and Sakiel-Norn is no exception. A cult of blind assassins lurks in the shadows, waiting for their moment . . .

What does all of this mean? Laura’s hungry fans hunt for clues in the ruins of Sakiel-Norn and in the dingy back alleys where the lovers meet. Much of Laura’s young life and untimely death is shrouded in mystery, and conspiracy theories abound. Who are the unnamed lovers? What really happened to Laura?

I’d imagined many things before opening the book, but I’d not expected a set of Matryoshka dolls: this story within a story within another story. It sounds crazy even for me to say it out loud, but Atwood pulls it off with consummate ease. Iris’s reminiscences, the clandestine meetings of the lovers and the story of Sakiel-Norn run alongside in three grim yet pulsating narratives. The Matryoshka dolls not only strut around on their own but also come together to form this breathtakingly singular entity.

Sigh.

Here you go, M Atwood. Here’s a sigh for a sigh.

Or would you prefer a sigh within a sigh within another sigh?