This stagy moment, as Iris recalls it, allows for the stark juxtaposition of one girl's self-destructiveness with Iris is obliged to watch out for her, and on one occasion even stops Laura from drowning herself. ''I do not.'' With her capacity for sudden, passionate attachments to peopleĪnd beliefs, the younger sister is a bafflingly nervy girl who gets away with things: ''Laura had such a direct gaze, such blankly open eyes, such a pure, rounded forehead, that few ever suspected her of duplicity.'' Iris is the older and more sensible of the two sisters Laura the more alluring and ungraspable. In Toronto and their mother dies of a miscarriage, the girls are more or less raised by Iris's old nursemaid, Reenie, a starchy font of home truths and old saws. The girls grow up in the 1920's inĪ large 19th-century house named Avilion after the ''island-valley'' in ''Idylls of the King.'' After their war-wounded father exchanges his religious faith for disreputable rambles This is chiefly the story of the Chase sisters, Iris and Laura, granddaughters of the benevolent founder of a button factory in the Canadian town of Port Ticonderoga.
The setup and setting are promising enough.
In ''The Blind Assassin,'' overlong and badly written, our first impressions of the dramatis personae prove not so much lasting as total. If we apply the old Forsterian standard that roundĬharacters are ones ''capable of surprising in a convincing way,'' Atwood's new novel, for all its multilayered story-within-a-story-within-a-story construction, must be judged flat as a pancake. Margaret Atwood has written a novel-within-a-novel that involves watery death and a science fiction best seller.Įarly 20 years ago, in speaking of her craft, the novelist Margaret Atwood observed that ''a character in a book who is consistently wellīehaved probably spells disaster for the book.'' She might have asserted the more general principle that consistent anything in a character can prove tedious.
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