Royal Classic Knitwear

Margaret Anne Doody

• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
  Bloomsbury, 521 pp, £16.99, September 2000, ISBN 0 7475 4937 0

Margaret Atwood’s tenth novel is both familiar and new. As it is an Atwood novel, we get eggs, a ravine, shit, snow, an ethereal double or sisterly doppelgänger, a bridge, a river, an act of violence – images and themes from her earlier fiction metamorphosed. The Blind Assassin also possesses the unusual lyrical sensuousness that distinguished Alias Grace (1996), Atwood’s last major work. A complex rumination on narrative, it is as elegant and dynamic as its predecessor, but more contemplative and more edgy – and much more witty.