Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin.

St. Andrews, B.A.

New York, Talese/Doubleday. 2000 521 pages. $26. ISBN 0-385-47572-1

BE WARNED. Open the covers of The Blind Assassin and you will enter the broad boulevards, historical mazes, strange alleyways, pitiless personalities, bombed buildings, stinging assertions, and murky certainties of Margaret Atwood's disciplined imagination. Yet you will want to go in there.

Readers who dare to explore Atwoodian regions are so numerous, so influential, and so ferocious in their defense of her talent that she has been awarded the Booker Prize, the Norwegian Order of Literary Merit, and Trillium Award, the (Canadian) Governor General's Award, the Dashiell Hammett Award, and the government of France's coveted Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, to name but a few achievements and accolades. How to account for this success, given that her characters are rarely likable? Or even ethical? In fact, most of the compassion and all of the heartbeat in Atwood's books are usually the reader's, not the protagonist's or antagonist's. Part of her success, then, is due to an intelligent and responsive readership; the other part is due to her mesmerizing way with a story, even a story as maddening and complex as this one.

The doomed sister Laura (and this is debatable) has moments of memorable behavior quite apart from the puzzle of her death. For example, she calmly excises from the historic family Bible stories or sayings that don't meet her standards or match her opinions. "`It's only paper,' said Laura, continuing to snip. `Paper isn't important. It's the words on them that are important.'" Yes, the words on them.

Iris Chase Griffen, the primary narrator, is the sister of suicidal Laura and the author of the original "Blind Assassin" manuscript. Iris is aptly named: first, because she is in some ways the eye, the "seer"; second, she indeed understands elements of the "chase." In fact, this wild goose chase of a book moves through multiple narratives and triple-tiered storytelling. Time lines cross as frequently as plot lines; class lines blur with political ones until nothing is left but a fateful grid etched by the desert winds of war, hatred, snarled love, mean-spiritedness, greed, and fate.

A reader who does enter this territory will suspect early on that The Blind Assassin is a book which belongs on a university course syllabus as an example of the post-Joycean novel. That is, the writing defines "play" as only great novelists understand the word: it is precise, mischievous, deft, educated, mysterious, stratified, ambitious, allusive, confounding, spirited, maddening, and clarifying.

The novel also eludes genre classification: journalism meet memoir, mystery story meets tragic romance meets science fiction, family epic meets cultural commentary. The blind assassin meets the mute maiden, and everything seems to resemble a hall of mirrors. All the secrets will, of course, be revealed. Almost. Eventually. Some even truthfully.

Atwood's demanding, dependably entertaining novel has more traction than a Michelin tire; it will grab your road, dear Reader, and not let go until you arrive safely at the author's intended destination.

B. A. St. Andrews
SUNY Health Science Center, Syracuse