Canada's prize novelist of the day has just brought out her 15th novel since 1969: "The Blind Assassin." Weighing in at 521 pages, quite likely Margaret Atwood's longest novel, it is a prodigious achievement in its ambition.

Her narrative weaves smoothly along on five levels, starting off literally in the first paragraph with the fiery death of the narrator's younger sister, Laura, at age 26 -- a death whose cause will only be revealed in the last pages of the book, although perceptive readers may have their own suspicions somewhat earlier.

1. Iris Chase Griffen, born in 1916, is now commenting in diary form on her daily life in the small Canadian town of Port Ticonderoga, recording all the small discontents and grievances age brings. She has a tart tongue though, noting for instance how the Cookie Gremlin where she stops for a snack offers cookies "huge, the size of a cow pat, the way they make them now -- tasteless, crumbly, greasy."

2. Iris gives us a fairly detailed accounting of her life from its beginning as the elder of two granddaughters of the little town's leading manufacturer -- of buttons. Her father returned from the First World War lame and with one eye. He drinks. Her mother is a sensitive, weak soul, given to good works, who dies of a miscarriage when Iris is nine. Iris and her younger by three-and-a-half years sister, Laura, are basically brought up by Rennie, the housekeeper, a strong, dependable woman.

   The father hires expensive tutors who ineffectively educate the two girls, who are left more or less to their own devices. At 18 Iris is thrust into a loveless but dutiful marriage to a rising entrepreneur, Richard Griffen, essentially to rescue her father's business, which is rapidly sinking beneath the waves in the Depression.

3. Interspersed as a separate narrative, we have another novel, also titled "The Blind Assassin," which Iris tells us is the work of her late sister published after her death and becoming a cult novel to later generations. A man and a woman meet for brief sexual encounters. They are given no names but, we gather from Iris's narrative, she is the woman and the man, Alex Thomas, a communist on the run, who the two girls, while still teen-agers, hide in their family attic for a time.

4. In addition to his political activities, Alex writes science fiction stories for cheap pulp magazines. In a kind of Scheherazade fashion, after each sexual encounter he relates the plots of the stories he is working on and, every time they meet again, she is eager to hear what is going to happen next. As science fiction goes, Atwood serves up a decent pastiche of the 1930s variety, with giant green lizard men in bright red shorts coming to destroy the city of Sakiel-Norn on the planet Zycron.

   Into Alex's tales we find he is working, transforming into fiction, his relationship with Iris. Young virgins on the planet Zycron are sacrificed but, because they used to cry and scream so much, the King ordered their tongues to be cut out -- shades of John Irving's first novel, "According to Garp." A lower order of the population of the mythical planet are blinded as children so they can weave the beautiful masks worn by the ruling class. When the children grow to adulthood, many become assassins -- blind assassins.

   Charged with orders to kill the latest virgin to set off a revolt, the assassin who can't see and the virgin who can't speak fall in love. But, before Iris can find what their fate will be, Alex goes off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Think John Garfield, the Hollywood actor of the '30s and '40s, as Alex and you get a fairly good notion of the style of the character.

5. Tucked in between the three parallel narratives, Atwood drops in clippings, social notes from newspapers about activities of the family over the decades, ending with an obituary of Iris.

Of course what Atwood is doing in writing an apparent love story is presenting a woman of her period, who docilely, dutifully obeys the dictates of men: her father, a repressed, neurotic man and her husband, a true swine of the first order, a virtual feminist caricature of the odious male of the species. (In addition to being piggish around women, he supported Hitler up to the Second World War, just in case you needed any additional evidence of his odiousness.) True, Alex appears more appealing than the other two men in her life -- not difficult -- but love appears more intense on her side than his.

As a portrait of a period, "The Blind Assassin" works most successfully, although you can't help wondering about those four letter words scattered through the second "Blind Assassin," as it were. Supposedly published in 1947 at a time when Norman Mailer didn't dare use his favorite F-word, substituting "fug" in "The Naked and the Dead" you may remember, it seems that here Atwood felt the need to liven up her prose at the sacrifice of period authenticity.

No matter, "The Blind Assassin" is one of the Fall's big books by one of the better writers of the age. It is a good read, although one I suspect to be appreciated more by women than male readers.