Playing hopscotch on a minefield

Early in her strange, sad story, the now elderly Iris Chase ponders the trendy approach to designer tradition currently offered in gift boutiques, such as the one owned by her kindly friend Myra. "History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells."

Quite a whiff, however, surrounds the narrative that unfolds as Iris tells - without ever losing her sense of humour - of the many hurts and betrayals affecting her and her tragic sister Laura. Yet for all the horror and domestic injustice of this novel, which is a dark family saga, a bitter romance, and ultimately a meditation on old age, Atwood confers a sense of life as well as a brisk pace guaranteed to hold the reader hostage. Be warned: once you begin reading The Blind Assassin, it is unlikely you will put it down until the last page is reached, and that with some regret.

There is a conversational tone about this one-sitting book, and whenever the writing veers towards the clever, Atwood's natural irony and black humour usually diffuses the atmosphere. Long ranked among the elite of Canada's writers, there are moments throughout this long novel, her tenth, when the quick-fire, intelligent Atwood approaches that tone of laconic regret mastered by John Banville. Iris, in common with several Banvillean narrators, is both witness and supplicant. She makes few apologies for herself and earns our sympathy more through Atwood's shrewd sense of fair play than by sentimentality. First published as a poet with The Circle Game in 1966, Atwood's first novel, The Edible Woman, appeared three years later. As a writer she appeals more to the intellect than the emotions, yet she understands intense emotions as evident in the handling of the obsessive relationship at the heart of the novel-within-the-novel in this new book.

As with her most recent novel, the Booker short-listed Alias Grace (1996), The Blind Assassin is a densely plotted, meticulous tale which acquires ease and fluency through Atwood's formidable technical skill and attention to detail. Again there is an historical base in that the family is a merchant dynasty. The Chase wealth is built on buttons - a button factory, to be precise, and Atwood is always precise. She enjoys her puns and jokes, though her playfulness tends to evoke images of playing hopscotch on a minefield. The Chase story is also that of the Canadian merchant class, and social class is another theme of the novel. On several levels The Blind Assassin succeeds as a modern variation on the classic European fairy tale. Atwood features a politically ambitious man and his socially ambitious sister as the dangerous siblings, and the narrator's sister is the tragic princess, with the narrator filling the role of prisoner in the tower.

Iris at 82 proves a likeable narrator, a woman who has known wealth and poverty, painful longing and immense personal loss, including the deaths of her mother, father, sister and daughter. Intelligent and more wry than sharp, she is as compelling a voice as Elaine Risley, the 50-year-old artist narrator of Atwood's finest novel to date, the 1989 Booker contender Cat's Eye, if a milder character. But then Iris is much older than Risley; and the physical business of slowly falling apart provides some distraction from the many wrongs she has suffered. Even having a shower is a challenge of sorts. "Dried, lotioned and powdered, sprayed like mildew, I was in some sense of the word restored. Only there was still the sensation of weightlessness, or rather of being about to step off a cliff. Each time I put a foot out I set it down provisionally, as if the floor might give way underneath me. Nothing but surface tension holding me in place."

Whereas ambiguity proves central to the mysterious quality of Alias Grace, itself rooted in history, The Blind Assassin, for all its twists and turns, time-shifts and flashbacks, is far less a thriller than might be expected. That said, it does not prove a weakness. The strength of this novel lies in Iris's narrative voice and the way it conveys the bemused wonder of an observer who was also a protagonist, albeit at times a passive one. Iris speaks about her present life, in which the effort of drinking coffee or finishing a doughnut is too much. From her present state of physical helplessness she moves back in time to her childhood and youth.

Initially there are three main players; her parents and her younger sister Laura. Although dead from the opening sentence ("Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge") and described as a dreamy, doomed idealist of sorts, Laura emerges as a vivid, almost mythic character. Life has ransacked Iris's feelings to such an extent, that she admits, "Having experienced both, I'm not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it." Iris is often neutral, yet Atwood makes her affection for her sister obvious. She is recalled as a beautiful, unworldly, clumsy girl given to dramatic pronouncements and falling over and - or - breaking things.

The childhood sequences are vivid, even competitive. During those years Laura seems more in touch with realities than she would later appear, while her imaginative energy far outstripped that of Iris, four years her senior. Following their mother's death, they had been haphazardly educated at home. Somewhat abruptly Iris finds herself at the receiving end of a proposal that she must accept as her family's money and hopes are gone. Entrusted to the care of her future husband's sister, Iris quickly suspects she will never be more than a spectator in her marriage. She is right. The characterisation of her husband's sister is a variation of the Wicked Witch theme.

Even Winifred's preference for green outfits and orange lipstick becomes sinister. "She had green alligator shoes to match. They were glossy, rubbery, slightly wet-looking, like lily pads, and I thought I had never seen such exquisite, unusual shoes. Her hat was the same shade - a round swirl of fabric, balanced on her head like a poisonous cake." Winifred is presented as a dazzling but also artificial self-creation, supported by new money. There is a subtle vulgarity about her that Atwood never loses control of.

The immediate story spans some 60 years. But there is also a second narrative developing throughout. In it, a young woman is engaged in a furtive sexual affair with a man on the run who, instead of giving her emotional assurances for the future, tells her elaborate fantasy stories. His fantastical yarns have echoes of the bizarre world of Atwood's 1986 Booker runner-up The Handmaid's Tale. This novel-within-the-novel is The Blind Assassin of the title. Published after her death, it has made Laura Chase famous. Literary pilgrims continue to visit the dead girl's grave. The authorship of the cult novel is not that important, although it is easily guessed. Its passages are told in an urgent present tense. Every gesture of the relationship is assessed as it is acted out in a succession of rented, ever more squalid rooms. The supposedly fictional story which shocked readers on its initial publication, recalls Iris, is tame indeed compared with the cynical behaviour of the narrator's husband and his wicked witch sister.

Whether as poet, short story writer, novelist or polemical essayist, Margaret Atwood's overview is always marked by clarity, a sense of purpose and an ability to control her daunting intelligence. Her characterisation and dialogue are at their sharpest throughout this novel. For all the depth of story and the wealth of clues - most of which are not important, as this is no thriller - the genius of the book is ultimately most effectively expressed by the wry, witty, peculiarly loyal Iris who loses everything except hope. In a year in which Canadian fiction is well served by Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief and Michael Ondaatje's powerful Anil's Ghost it could well secure Atwood's fourth Booker shortlisting.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times