Off the Bookshelf

The Blind Assassin

Doubleday, 521 pp., $26

"Thick plots are my specialty," snaps one of Margaret Atwood's enigmatic characters in The Blind Assassin, an elegant mélange of romance, science fiction, satire, and history that more than corroborates the aforementioned quip. Atwood's follow-up to Alias Grace is a sprawling tale of sibling love and rivalry that pulls from several different stories, some more intriguing than others, which ultimately come together in an awkward, unsatisfying fashion. The novel begins with the mysterious death of celebrated author Laura Chase and unspools into a collection of newspaper articles, personal recollections, and a novel-within-a-novel titled The Blind Assassin (written by the deceased), which helps to explain who the woman was and whether her death was accidental. It's an interesting premise, but Atwood stuffs Assassin with so many competing elements that the thematic weight of the piece is all but sabotaged by its intricate construction. Atwood's prose remains as magnetic as ever, and her characters unravel with a precision that keeps things moving at a brisk pace, but between virginal sacrifices on the planet Zycron and button factory politics following the Depression, I found myself looking for an inch of common ground. Atwood partially finds it as The Blind Assassin progresses, but not without a few unnecessary digressions along the way.