Margaret Atwood
THE BLIND ASSASSIN
Mirror writing
John Mullan analyses Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. Week three: novels within novels
John Mullan
Saturday 22 November 2003
Saturday 22 November 2003
P
lenty of novels feature novelists, but few give even a line of the novels that the characters are supposed to have written. A recent example is Reta Winters, narrator of Carol Shields's Unless. Further back, there is Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator of Anthony Powell's roman-fleuve A Dance to the Music of Time. It is important to the plots of both these works that the protagonists have had success with their own novels. Yet these fictional fiction-makers are so much the alter egos of the actual novelists that, one imagines, they would hardly be able to write in a different way from Shields or Powell.
