The Blind Assassin

Iris wakes up dreading the award ceremony. Reluctantly, she gets out of bed and into the shower. She finds it hard to recognize her own elderly self and she fears that she is going to die by accidentally falling down the stairs. She doesn’t eat breakfast, only drinking a glass of water. At 9:30 a.m., Walter picks her up. Iris can tell by the way Walter is dressed that he won’t be attending the ceremony, which makes sense considering that he doesn’t read. Iris thinks, “I should have married someone like Walter. Good with his hands.” However, she then revises this and thinks that she shouldn’t have married anyone at all. When they pull up to the school, Myra is waiting to greet them. 

Myra is overweight and grey-haired. She is constantly trying to bring Iris to the local hairdresser. She gives Iris a sickly brownie and cup of coffee, which Iris pretends to eat. The ceremony begins with a prayer. The graduates then arrive onstage to receive their diplomas, and Iris thinks about how all young people have a particular kind of beauty. At the same time, she feels resentful of young people for not realizing how lucky they are. Finally, the time comes for the Laura Chase prize to be awarded, an event that begins with a long, rapturous speech about Winifred, who is an “old bitch” in Iris’s opinion. The politician introducing the award then speaks about Laura, carefully dodging the subject of her death, which everyone believes was a suicide.

The Blind Assassin was similarly a source of scandal: people tended to read it in secret, hoping to find “smut” and to discover how the characters corresponded to real people. Everyone assumed the woman in the story was Laura, but there was much speculation over the identity of the man. Ultimately, the novel was dismissed “a thin book, so helpless.” Suddenly, the winner of the prize is announced, though Iris misses her name. The young woman is tall, with light yellow-brown skin, which leads Iris to speculate that she has Asian heritage. Iris wonders if her own granddaughter, Sabrina, “looks like that now.”  

Feeling overwhelmed, Iris manages to say a few words as she presents the award. She speaks vaguely about how Laura would have felt about it, careful not to say anything that isn’t true. As she hands the award to the winner, she whispers, “Bless you. Be careful.” The winner kisses Iris on the cheek. Iris, stunned, is helped back into her seat.

Spring is coming, although Iris can no longer tend to her blossoming garden like she used to. In her old age, she is forced to confront the reality of her own mortality. Sitting with a notebook and pen, Iris remembers when, in 1929, Laura borrowed the first fountain pen Iris owned and she broke it. Now, Iris wonders why she is writing, but begins anyway. Her doctor tells her she needs to walk every day, but she doesn’t like doing it, as she feels like everyone stares at her. She wonders if it was a mistake to move back to Port Ticonderoga. Earlier, she walked through town and observed the changes to local businesses.

Iris also went to the Chase family monument in the cemetery, which is taller than all the others. She remembers coming here with Laura and Reenie. Now, Iris comes twice a year in order to “tidy up, if for no other reason.” There are a few flowers left by Laura’s fans. Iris reads the names of those buried there: Benjamin Chase and his wife Adelia; Norval Chase and his wife Liliana; two young men, Edgar and Percival; and Laura. Last week, the newspaper printed a picture of Laura alongside an article about the memorial prize. It is the same photograph that was printed on the book jacket cover of The Blind Assassin. In it, Laura looks beautiful but sanitized.

Iris remembers the gossip that circulated around town when Laura’s body was cremated. There is space reserved in the Chase memorial for Iris; Iris’s daughter Aimee is buried with Richard and Winifred at the Griffen memorial in Toronto. Winifred tried to have Laura buried there too, but Iris scattered Laura’s ashes before Winifred got a chance. Iris wonders where Sabrina will be buried, although she’s not even totally sure that Sabrina is still alive. Sabrina ran away for the first time when she was 13; at the time, Winifred accused Iris of being responsible, but in reality Sabrina never chose to contact her grandmother.  

It is now summer, and it’s very hot outs. Myra tells Iris she should get air conditioning, but Iris can’t afford it. On Iris’s daily walk, she sets off for the button factory. There are two rivers in Port Ticonderoga, the fast-running Louveteau and the much slower Jogues, which is used to transport limestone. A cliff overlooks the Louveteau; every so often a dead body lies at the bottom of it, and it is usually unclear whether the person fell by accident or on purpose. The button factory sits on the east bank of the Louveteau. For many years it was abandoned and “derelict,” before recently being renovated by an “energetic citizens’ committee.” The building now has a sign next to it that reads, “Welcome Button Factory Visitors.”

Inside the factory, waltz music plays and the walls are covered in giant archival photos. An extract from a 1899 newspaper article notes that the factory was not like the “dark Satanic mills of Olde England” but was instead a pleasant and even “enchanting” place. There is a photo of Iris’s grandfather Benjamin from 1901, then her father Norval, standing next to a World War I memorial. There is now a bar in the factory where live music is played on Saturdays and where local microbrewery beer is sold. Myra works in the gift shop, which is filled with sweet-smelling crafts and other items. Myra often gives Iris things from the shop that no one buys. Myra is Reenie’s daughter and, unlike her mother, is religious. Iris buys a cup of coffee and a cookie from the café and sits down.

Iris’s grandfather Benjamin built the button factory in the early 1870s. At the time, there was a surge in the Canadian settler population, prompting a demand for clothing and buttons. Benjamin was descended from seventh-generation Puritans who immigrated to Pennsylvania in the 1820s. Founding the factory was relatively easy, as both raw materials and labor were cheaply available. The factory didn’t produce beautiful or unusual buttons, but rather the plain, standard, durable kind. The factory’s success allowed Benjamin to buy other mills, turning them into more factories, including a knitting factory and ceramic factory. He made a point of keeping his factories orderly, safe, and technologically advanced.

At least, this is the version of the story printed in The Chase Industries: A History, a book Benjamin himself commissioned in 1903. Sitting on a bench eating her cookie, Iris feels dizzy and she drops her cane and then her coffee, which spills all over her skirt. Myra sees her and comes rushing over to help.

These days, Iris often has trouble sleeping. In the middle of the night, she goes down to the kitchen to get a snack and suddenly feels as if another person—the house’s true owner—is about to arrive and scold her for trespassing. She thinks about how, after she dies, Myra will likely take charge of sorting through her possessions. The day before, Myra drove Iris to buy an electric fan, and on the way they passed Avilion, which is now an old people’s home with the strange name of Valhalla. It is now a rather grim place, and Iris is the only person who alive who remembers it in its prime. It was spacious, with wooden banisters, a gazebo, a conservatory, a billiards room, a library that featured a marble sculpture of Medusa, and stained-glass windows.

Iris’s grandmother Adelia, who died before Iris was born, oversaw the design and construction of Avilion. Adelia was from an “established” Montreal French-English family whose fortune dwindled. This led her to marry for “crude money, button money,” rather than the preferred option of genteel wealth. Iris thinks about a picture she has of her grandparents, where they both look stiff and uncomfortable. As a young teenager, Iris would “romanticize” Adelia, imagining her as a glamorous woman with a secret lover. However, there was practically no chance that such fantasies could have been true in real life, due to the intense scrutiny and restrictions to which Adelia would have been subjected.

Benjamin is 40 when he marries Adelia; he hopes to benefit from her refined taste. Avilion is finished in 1889 and is named after the island where King Arthur went to die in a poem by Tennyson. Iris believes the name represented Adelia’s own feelings of “exile.” She dreamed of traveling and having a rich cultural life, but Benjamin would not leave Port Ticonderoga and Adelia would not go anywhere without him. Adelia was a fan of sculptures and she purchased many that she believed were “authentic” European pieces but were likely fake. Iris wonders if Benjamin might have felt some relief when Adelia died. The house was left preserved in exact state in which Adelia left it, such that Iris and Laura were “brought up by her” even though she was already dead when they were born.  

After Benjamin and Adelia are married, they have three sons: Norval is the eldest, followed by Edgar and Percival. Benjamin hoped they would work in the button business, but Adelia dreams of “loftier” ambitions and sends them to Trinity College School in Port Hope, where they learn to feel ashamed of their father and their new-money background. While on vacation from university, Edgar and Percival drive around town and drink beer. It’s rumored that they got some girls pregnant and secretly paid for them to have abortions.

Adelia dies of cancer in 1913. During the last month of Adelia’s life, Reenie (who is 13 at the time) and her mother start working at Avilion. Despite being in great pain, Adelia insists on getting up every day and leaving the house, to the point that she has to be tied to the bed for the sake of her own health. None of her three sons have any interest in the button business; Norval dreams of working in law and then politics. This likely causes tension between Benjamin and the boys.

In the present, Walter assembles Iris’s new fan and installs it in her bedroom. In the evening, Iris sits on her porch with the old fan and writes. Iris’s parents married in 1914. When Iris was young, she quizzed Reenie about the circumstances of their marriage. Reenie was 16 when she started working at Avilion full-time. She’d been Iris’s nursemaid, but she stayed on after as a permanent housekeeper. She told Iris that Norval proposed to Iris’s mother, Liliana, at an ice-skating party. Because Liliana was Methodist and Norval was Anglican, Liliana was beneath Norval’s social class. If Adelia had been alive, she probably would have prevented the marriage from happening.

Liliana was a serious person: at only 18, she was already trained as a teacher. Her father was a lawyer for Chase Industries, and the family was reasonably affluent. Liliana was dedicated to helping the less fortunate and she taught poor people “as a sort of missionary work.” By the time they were engaged, Liliana had known Norval for a while; they’d even starred together as Ferdinand and Miranda in a production of The Tempest that Adelia put on in the Avilion garden. Norval could have married a richer or more genteel woman, but like Liliana, he was also serious, and Reenie explained that he wanted someone reliable. Iris imagines that Norval’s proposal was probably awkward yet endearing. Liliana would have paused before giving her reply, which meant “yes.”

Reenie’s description of the wedding centers on the Liliana’s outfit and the decorations. One month after the wedding, World War I begins, which dooms Liliana and Norval’s marriage. Norval, Percival, and Edgar enlist in the army immediately and are sent to Bermuda, where they spend a leisurely period playing cricket, apparently desperate to join the real action. Benjamin, whose business profits greatly from the war, nonetheless remains gripped by fear about the fate of his sons and eager for them to return. Liliana moves into Avilion and stays there even after Norval leaves; before he’s deployed to France in 1915, Liliana goes to visit him during a stopover in Halifax.

Traveling by train, surrounded by young soldiers, Liliana suddenly realizes it’s possible that Norval might die in the war. Presently, Iris doesn’t know what happened in the few days her mother spent in Halifax. Norval sends Liliana letters from France, parts of which are erased by censors. Meanwhile, back at Avilion, Liliana sets to work helping the war effort, recruiting other local women to join her in raising money through rummage sales and knitting garments for the troops. In local hospitals, she tends to soldiers with the very worst injuries. In the present, Iris reflects on her mother’s profound altruism and self-discipline.

Iris herself is born in 1916. Within a month, both Percival and Edgar are killed in France. In August, Benjamin has a stroke that damages his speech and memory, and Liliana becomes his “interpreter,” claiming she is the only person who can understand him. Presently, Iris imagines the frustration Benjamin must have experienced at not being able to communicate and the sadness and confusion triggered by his memory loss. He may not have even understood that two of his sons were dead.

Presently, Iris sees news of extreme flooding on the weather channel and thinks about how “greed” is driving climate change. Returning to the story of her family, she jumps ahead to November 11, 1918—Armistice Day. Norval was wounded at the Somme, but he survived and was promoted to second lieutenant. Upon returning home, he’s greeted as a hero. He lost one eye and the function of one leg; Iris thinks that the amount that had changed for both him and Liliana must have been overwhelming for them. Iris imagines an awkward reunion and she believes her mother must have realized that Norval had had sex with other women while he was at war.

Liliana prays for the ability to forgive Norval for his infidelities, yet still feels jealous of all the other women who have been around him, even the nurses that tended to him in hospital. Back in Avilion, she busies herself caring for her husband, who—to her horror—has become an atheist. He rejects the idea that he and all the other soldiers were “fighting for God and Civilization”—although, out of sensitivity for Liliana’s feelings, he avoids mentioning this except when he’s been drinking. Norval attempts to cure his trauma with alcohol, although he tries to hide the extent of his drinking from Liliana in order to avoid scaring her. As a child, Iris is afraid of him even though she doesn’t believe he would ever actually hurt her.

Iris explains that it wasn’t the case that her parents didn’t love each other—they were just estranged from each other. Before long, Norval starts getting the train into Toronto, where he drinks and womanizes. Iris explains that no one ever told her this outright, but that it was possible to absorb information via the silences in her household growing up. Following the death of his brothers, Norval decides it’s his responsibility to take over the family business and he hopes to have sons of his own who will do the same. He makes a point of employing veterans, hiring too many people even after the economy crashes. He becomes known as a “fool.” Presently, Iris observes that while she has some superficial similarities to Norval, really it is he and Laura who are linked, because both of them were capable of suicide.

Iris recalls an evening in 1919 when she was sitting in with Norval and Liliana, who was mending dresses. In five years’ time, Liliana would be dead. Iris read to her parents, although she doubted that her father was listening. Soon after, Laura was born.

In the present day, Iris thinks about how heart, which keeps her alive, will one day be the thing that kills her, which she believes is how love works, too. She goes to the cemetery again, and on the way home she stops at a doughnut shop. While there, she goes to the bathroom, where she sees words scribbled on the toilet stall door. One of the lines is a quote by Laura: “All Gods Are Carnivorous.”

According to Reenie, Laura’s birth was long and difficult, and at times it seemed like she was going to die as a newborn. Following the birth, Liliana was left weak and unwell. Laura was an “anxious” infant, scared of many things and easily distressed, but strangely tolerant of physical pain. Iris thinks about her mother’s death and how it is both accurate and inaccurate to say that it “changed everything.” It began on Tuesday, which was “bread day,” the occasion when Reenie produced all the bread for the rest of the week.

When Iris and Laura are young, Reenie gives the girls leftover dough from her baking so that they can make bread men with raisins for eyes—until she finds out that Laura hasn’t been eating hers but instead hoarding them in a drawer. Following this discovery, Laura holds “mass burial” for all the bread men she’s forced to throw away. During the burial, Reenie comments that she has sympathy for Laura’s future husband because Laura is stubborn, but Laura replies that she’s never going to get married. Reenie scoffs at this, pointing out that Laura is too accustomed to living a comfortable life to refuse marriage and indicating that she wouldn’t survive on her own.

Liliana never usually wastes food, always compelling her daughters to think of the less fortunate, but that day she can’t eat her bread crusts. Iris instantly knows something is terribly wrong. Lately, Liliana has been knitting in the afternoon and she usually falls asleep, which is also unusual for her. Reenie compares human reproduction to the bread she bakes, yet although Iris was old enough to know that people aren’t made from dough, she still doesn’t understand how they’re actually conceived. That Tuesday morning, Liliana sits drinking tea while Reenie makes the bread. It’s hot outside, and the kitchen is even hotter because of the oven. Reenie offers Laura some dough for a bread man, but Laura refuses it.

Iris and Laura are under the table when suddenly they hear Liliana collapse and her teacup smash. Reenie tells Iris to get Norval, but Iris can’t find him. When Iris returns to the kitchen, she sees blood on the floor and tells Laura not to look at it. Later, she overhears Reenie talking to the laundrywoman, named Mrs. Hillcoate, about how Liliana’s last pregnancy almost killed her and how the doctor had thus warned her about not getting pregnant again. Tiptoeing away, Iris and Laura encounter a basket outside Liliana’s room that contains the deformed baby she miscarried. Iris tries to hurry Laura away, but to her surprise Laura remains calm and remarks sympathetically, “It’s not finished […] It didn’t want to get itself born.”

Later that day, Reenie takes Iris and Laura to see Liliana, who’s sleeping with a strange expression on her face. Lilian’s eyes open, and Reenie tells the girls they can hug her gently, which they do. Five days later, Liliana dies. In the days leading up to her death, Iris had only been able to see her for brief visits. On the last of these, Liliana told Iris to be a good sister to Laura, and Iris wondered if Liliana loved Laura more than her. Iris feels that she can’t live up to her mother’s request; she’s often cruel to Laura. However, doesn’t want to ruin the idea of her that Liliana had in her head.

In the present, Iris wonders why people want to “memorialize” themselves, a process that starts before death through things like photographs, diplomas, and monogrammed linen. These items convey a desire for others to “witness” people’s lives. The day after Liliana’s funeral, Reenie sends Iris and Laura out into the garden, her face flushed by crying. The funeral reception had been a formal, “respectable” event. Reenie had braided the girls’ hair tightly with black ribbon.

Laura seems confused by the ritual of grief, but when the adults remark that she’s too young to understand death, Laura replies that she isn’t sad because “Mother is with God.” Laura’s faith is always more sturdy and unequivocal than that of others. In the garden, Iris tells Laura to stop singing because Liliana is dead. Laura replies that this isn’t really true because their mother is “in Heaven with the little baby,” and Iris pushes her off the ledge they’re sitting on. Laura starts crying and runs away, and Iris runs after her.

About a month after Liliana’s death, Norval takes Iris into town without Laura. While they walk, Norval tells Iris that he’ll buy her a soda from Betty’s Luncheonette. Previously, Iris understood that it would be improper for her to go to this establishment, which was frequented by the lower-class “townspeople.”  She also isn’t usually allowed to drink soda. Once they get there, however, Iris can tell by the way that Norval speaks to the waitress that he comes there often. Norval tells Iris that she must promise to take care of Laura if something happens, which confused Iris, though she nods in agreement.

Norval then begins a discussion about buttons, telling Iris it’s time she learns to understand “the simple principles of economics.” Iris has heard Norval call the button factory “a trap” and “a jinx” while he was drunk, but now he’s discussing it seriously. When Norval asks Iris if she understands what he’s explaining, Iris lies and says that she does. Before Liliana died, she’d told Iris, “Underneath it all, your father loves you.” Liliana rarely said things like this, usually only discussing love in a religious context. In a way, her statement felt less like reassurance and more like a burden.