While reading this, it might help to compare this to other examples of Gothic fiction, and the general themes. Various people online referred to the “whodunit” structure of the novel, but I read it more as a family drama.Īnother word that I saw associated with this novel quite a lot was Gothic fiction.

The tension in the novel comes not from wanting to know how everything ends but a desire to find out why it ended as it did. In ways, there are no surprises - within the first 15 pages, it is established that Laura drove her car off the road in 1945, that Iris married an older man named Richard Griffen and that he died two years after the war. Focusing on two sisters, Laura and Iris Chase, the novel intersperses newspaper clippings and excerpts of Laura’s sci-fi romance novel with Iris’s memoirs, written over 50 years after her sister’s death and the actions of this novel. She is a feminist and her socio-political views often show through in her writing. Many of her other novels revolve around women’s friendships and interactions, and this novel is no exception. Margaret Atwood’s most famous work may well be The Handmaid’s Tale, sometimes described as a feminist 1984. Not even the structure is straightforward: there are newspaper clippings inserted throughout, and there is a story within a novel within a memoir. On the one hand, it is a very straight forward novel on the other hand, it has several layers that reveal themselves as the novel progresses and it is hard to know how much to say without giving it away or how to little to say and still make it sound interesting.

Every time I started to write something, I realized I was writing more of a review than an introduction or preview. This month, I have the honor of hosting the book club, and I admit, writing the preview for Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is a bit more daunting than I expected.

The assassin novel by margaret atwood