Atwood tends to leave me in two minds, and The Blind Assassin is no exception. It tells a story, well-told, and as such it's readable and interesting enough. But I never really got into it (although the second half held me a lot more than the first, as things gathered momentum and more of Atwood's subtle arrows struck home) and I'm still at a bit of a loss as to why Atwood is so critically acclaimed - I can see why she's widely read and well loved, but I just don't think she's as good as people make her out to be.
Perhaps I just don't respond to what seems to be her main theme, here as elsewhere - namely, the relationships of females (women and girls and those in between) with each other. I think that it's a strength of Atwood's that she's able to so vividly - and, though I wouldn't know, seemingly accurately - invoke these relations, but a consequence is that it's not generalisable to relationships generally, leaving me at one remove. That said, I'd be interested to know what others thought of Iris and Laura, taken as people/characters - I'm not sure which of the two I found more sympathetic (not that they're set up in such a way that the choice is necessary), and the pathos of Laura's character works both ways. Of course, it's fundamentally about storytelling, too, but I must say that while that theme is, of course, ever interesting and perhaps even unavoidable, there's a limit to the number of times that I can interestedly read the same old handling of it, even when (as here) done well.
