The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dynastic Misfortune

That strip of Canada from the Niagara River to Lake St. Clair along the northern shore and hinterland of Lake Erie is a very peculiar place. Culturally it is best defined in negative terms: it is not the United States of those coarse and tasteless Yankees, and it is not French-speaking as are their equally coarse and tasteless neighbours in Quebec. Geographically I suppose it might be called lower rather than Southern Ontario, suggesting a certain psychic distance from the national capital in Ottawa and an obsessive concern about ‘leakage’ of population from the multiplying Catholic hordes in Lower Canada (which is in fact more ‘Upper’). Historically it was settled by American Anglican Loyalists fleeing retribution in their old homeland and, until after WW II, mostly by more British and Irish fleeing theirs. Socially it was perhaps one of the most class-ridden, politically manipulated, and snobbish places on the planet, at least until Canada itself became highly cosmopolitan.

Atwood combines all this to make that strip of land her principal character in The Blind Assassin. Using a combination of fictional press reports, conventional third-party narration, and first person quasi-memoir, along with an accumulating internal allegory, she diffuses the book’s point of view into a sort of literary montage of the place itself. The narrative line is the saga of the prominent Chase family over the hundred years from the 1890’s, its rise and fall and ultimate disintegration. But none of the family members is nearly as interesting as the cultural and political background in which they act, and within which they are effectively trapped.

The inhabitants of this land are like the Boers of South Africa. They came to dominance on the principle that might makes right and stay in power by treating it as a divine command. One way or another all the members of the Chase family are sacrificed materially and spiritually to the Gods of Power - family reputation, patriarchal will, a provincial ideal of aristocracy, subtle racism, less subtle misogyny, and a superstitious morality provided by the least educated but, paradoxically, most influential members of the community. They look on these things as values, things to be protected and preserved. They are in fact quasi-genetic defects that are passed along to their children and ensure their inability to find satisfaction in that land, or any other. As with the Boers, these people enact and execute a self-imposed death sentence, an example of which opens the book.

On the face of it, there is no reason to think that this fertile but otherwise rather nondescript piece of real estate in which nothing of world-historical significance has taken place (except perhaps the US retaliatory invasion and burning of York, later Toronto, during the War of 1812) might provide the substance for a longish novel of intricate family history. But it works, in the same way, for example, that the television series Dallas works to make Eastern Texas interesting. One can’t help but be drawn into Schadenfreude by the obvious hypocrisy, betrayals, and machinations of each generation. What Atwood reveals about the region’s culture is not its hidden depths but rather its secret shallowness. The waste of human effort and talent in maintaining itself is enormous. But these things are captivating, perhaps even titilating. Because Atwood only does the slowest of reveals, the reader is forced to pay attention to details as if the book were a murder mystery - which in a way is exactly what it is.

View all my reviews