is losing money. When he donates factory seconds to the poor, his wealthy competitor Richard Griffen condemns his generosity as false and charges him with dumping overruns. As the Chase family’s life grows Spartan, Reenie carefully turns the sheets to economize.

On Labor Day, 1934, the annual button factory picnic is held in spite of possible layoffs. There Laura meets a swarthy young man, Alex Thomas, a friend of Callista. A former divinity student, Alex has lost his faith and leans toward communism. Concern for his soul leads the ever-serious Laura to invite him to dinner, not realizing that her father has already invited Richard and his glittering sister, Winifred Griffen Prior. The result is a disastrous meal and a confrontation between Alex and “sleek,” ultraconservative Richard.

Eventually the button factory is forced to close in spite of Chase’s efforts to keep it solvent, but union organizers call his action a lockout and respond with a general strike. Callista, supporting the factory workers, leaves him. As the strike escalates, riots break out in Port Ticonderoga. The button factory is torched and a watchman killed. Alex, although not involved in the uprising, is blamed because as a labor organizer he has agitated in the relief camps. For a time Laura hides him at Avilion.

Captain Chase, feeling an obligation to his employees and their families, hopes to allow his factories to reopen by selling them to Richard’s Toronto firm. Iris, now eighteen, accompanies her rapidly disintegrating father to Toronto. There Richard proposes to her, although he is twice her age. Chase warns her that the family’s future depends on this marriage and his business merger with Richard, who, replete with new money, can employ Chase’s men and support Laura. Iris thus becomes her father’s sacrifice for the sake of his workers and his family. She is quickly taken in hand by the officious Winifred, who arranges the wedding and prepares her for society.

On the night before the wedding, Laura urges Iris to run away. The wedding photographs are marred by a scowling Laura, who refuses to catch the bridal bouquet. When the couple returns after a three-month European honeymoon, Richard’s treachery is revealed: Shortly after the wedding, Captain Chase died, yet Richard withheld Laura’s frantic telegrams from his bride. Back at Avilion, Laura informs her sister that after Richard betrayed their agreement by closing the Chase factories permanently, their father locked himself in the turret and drank himself to death. The merged corporation now belongs entirely to Richard, who controls both women’s lives.

At this point the story becomes more complicated. When Laura tries to flee, Richard, her legal guardian, orders her to a private school. After Alex leaves to fight with rebels in the Spanish Civil War, Laura is placed in a clinic and treated with electroshock therapy. Meanwhile, Iris gives birth to a daughter.

In many ways, Laura’s novel mirrors their lives. As the framework of her book unfolds, it becomes clear that the nameless writer is based on Alex Thomas, although his young lover is more difficult to identify. However, the tale that the man tells her introduces Atwood’s underlying themes. In his story, the great city of Sakiel-Norn is renowned for beautiful carpets made by slave children, who grow blind from the work by the age of eight or nine. At this point they are usually sent to brothels, where they are in great demand; the few who escape become skilled assassins. Such is the man of the title, a blind assassin hired to murder the king during the annual sacrifice of a tongueless virgin to the goddess of silence. Ironically, the assassin, with his delicate sense of touch, falls in love with the mute woman and determines to escape the city with her.

Betrayal is an obvious theme, as the blind assassin betrays those who have hired him to kill the king. Captain Chase has unwittingly betrayed his daughters and his employees by selling his factories to Richard, who in turn betrays nearly everyone. Callista betrays Alex, Winifred betrays Iris, and Iris betrays Laura.

Symbolically, both Iris and Laura serve as mute, passive virgins with respect to Richard. At first Iris will not argue with him, and Laura refuses to speak to him, believing he killed her father. Both women are willing to sacrifice themselves—Iris to the marriage for her father’s sake, Laura to desperate bargains with God in order to rescue others. After her mother dies, little Laura jumps into the river to exchange her life for her mother’s. She offers her life again in order to protect Alex as he goes off to war, telling Iris, “I had to take the pain and suffering onto myself. . . . I knew if I did that, it would save Alex.” At one point Iris even sees her sister as a divine victim:

She appeared . . . leached of colour, but at the same time translucent—as if little spikes of light were being nailed out through her skin from the inside, as if thorns of light were shooting out from her in a prickly haze.

Yet if the Chase sisters are sacrificial victims, who or what is the blind assassin of the title? Is it Alex, who, like his sightless hero, cannot see his destiny clearly? Is it the blind god of love, the blindfolded goddess of justice? Is the assassin death itself? Author and critic John Updike suggests that the true assassin, destroyer of all, is identified in a phrase by Guy de Maupassant that is found in Laura’s French copybook:L’histoire, cette vieille dame exaltée et menteuse—History, that old woman exalted and false.

Indeed, history does not deal kindly with these characters. In the end, the respected Chase family has collapsed, save for Iris’s estranged granddaughter Sabrina, now traveling in India. The predatory Griffens are dead, as is the elusive Alex Thomas. History has cut them down, remorseless.

Atwood is a witty, often playful writer who likes to take literary chances, as she does with this fractured chronology. Ellipsis is integral to her work; the important things are most often those she does not write down. As one might expect, satire and humor are present in the usual sly asides. Here, through excerpts from the society page, she mocks the social rituals of the fashionable set. She parodies the real pulp fiction of the 1930’s peopled with square-jawed heroes, voluptuous peach women, and lizard men in red shorts.

Iris, whose vision is growing clouded, is at last identified as the true author of Laura’s novel. She has published it in Laura’s name to memorialize her sister, although no one knows this. As she wryly remarks of the Laura Chase scholars who plague her, “For them I’m only an appendage: Laura’s odd, extra hand, attached to no body—the hand that passed her on, to the world.” Yet she admits a closer bond with her sister than she has ever acknowledged: “Laura was my left hand, and I was hers. We wrote the book together.”

Iris has written her family history to reveal details that she was never able to tell her daughter or granddaughter. She views herself as Sabrina’s uninvited fairy godmother, and the gift she brings is the truth of their shared blood, for she is the only one left who can give it. Age has mellowed her, brought her perspective and wisdom. She fantasizes a meeting with her granddaughter, who will see her as she is, “an old woman . . . living alone in a fossilized cottage, with hair like burning spiderwebs.” Iris is History, de Maupassant’s old woman, exalted but perhaps no longer false.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist 96 (June 1, 2000): 1796.

The Economist 356 (September 23, 2000): 101.

Library Journal 125 (August, 2000): 151.

Macleans, September 11, 2000, p. 54.

The New Yorker 76 (September 18, 2000): 142.

The New York Times September 8, 2000, p. B41.

The New York Times Book Review 105 (September 3, 2000): 7.

Publishers Weekly 247 (July 24, 2000): 67.

Time 56 (September 11, 2000): 118.