The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, published in 2000, won the Booker Prize for that year. Set in Canada, mostly in the 1930s and 1940s, it tells the story of the Chase family who made a fortune manufacturing buttons. The 1930s sees the button market in a precarious state. Norvel Chase, the company director, a well meaning but traumatised war veteran, makes a last desperate effort to save his family from financial ruin. He persuades his eldest daughter, Iris, to marry a wealthy and, as it turns out, deeply unsavoury, Toronto businessman. The consequences of this ill advised plan become the subject of the rest of the book, as told by Iris in her old age.

Iris tells her story, in a kind of top layer to the book. She also describes writing a book about her experience – a second layer. And within her book there’s a further story – a sci-fi tale written by Iris’s boyfriend who makes a living submitting material to pulp magazines. The resulting Russian doll of a novel suggests ambitions to comment on the nature of storytelling. It isn’t the most straightforward of reads, but neither is it as precious as it might sound from this description. According to The Blind Assassin, writing is often a less-than-heroic business, misleading, prone to exaggeration or simplification, distasteful, silly, whether we are talking about pulp sci-fi, or Virgil’s Aeneid, which through the eyes of Iris appears as a violent melodrama.

With all that said, fiction is still credited with special powers in revealing truths. Iris is able to say things in fiction that are impossible to say in her real life.

This book is a mixture, sometimes an uneasy one, of the literary and the low-brow. It’s knowing and arch – unable to fully commit to a straightforward story because it wants to remain above such things. The author holds the story at a distance, which also describes the experience of reading it. The Blind Assassin is undoubtedly interesting, but maybe more interesting than enjoyable – easier to admire than to love