![]() ![]() ![]() The setup and setting are promising enough. In ''The Blind Assassin,'' overlong and badly written, our first impressions of the dramatis personae prove not so much lasting as total. If we apply the old Forsterian standard that roundĬharacters are ones ''capable of surprising in a convincing way,'' Atwood's new novel, for all its multilayered story-within-a-story-within-a-story construction, must be judged flat as a pancake. Margaret Atwood has written a novel-within-a-novel that involves watery death and a science fiction best seller.Įarly 20 years ago, in speaking of her craft, the novelist Margaret Atwood observed that ''a character in a book who is consistently wellīehaved probably spells disaster for the book.'' She might have asserted the more general principle that consistent anything in a character can prove tedious. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |