By Margaret Atwood.

Doubleday; 538 pages; $26.

Bloomsbury; £16.99

THERE is a moment in this novel when a handyman employed by the narrator, Iris Chase, leaves his leather work-gloves behind, and Iris imagines herself on lonely nights, holding one of these “vacated leathery hands: it would be a companion of sorts.” It is an unimportant detail, but pure Margaret Atwood. Her novels are scattered with fragments of people: dismembered mannequins, severed-limb film props, cut-out people in scrapbooks, dolls, fetuses, things in preserving jars. One can imagine a doctoral thesis called “Synecdoche and deconstruction in Margaret Atwood's fiction”.

The trouble is, Ms Atwood's novels tend to bring out the literary critic in us. They are full of significant images and patterns that lend themselves nicely. Take, for example, in her newest novel, the night before Iris's loveless marriage, arranged by her industrialist father as part of a deal to avoid bankruptcy. Into their shared bathroom comes her younger sister Laura, wearing Iris's cast-off nightie, looking like a “heretic...on her way to execution”. She clasps her hands in front of her, “the fingers surrounding an O of space.” She is, of course, a reflection of Iris herself, ready for the sacrifice, complete with her virgin “O”. But just to make sure, Ms Atwood has Laura spray herself with Iris's perfume, a present from her fiancé. The scent is called Liu after a slave girl in an opera who kills herself. It all hangs together.

Iris doesn't, in fact, kill herself, though Laura does, driving off a Toronto bridge. As so often with Ms Atwood's characters, these sisters turn out to be aspects of one another: tame (Iris) and wild (Laura), upside and flipside, right hand and left.

In fact hands, literal and figurative, carry one of the central meanings of the book—hands holding pens, in particular. For the story of the sisters and their dynastic family is being written down as we read it by 83-year-old Iris. As her saga unwinds across the 20th century—rather predictably, about men making money and war and politics, and women making homes and babies—her sense of having been a blank for others to write on becomes increasingly apparent. Her writing hand seems, in consequence, almost to detach itself, and to move with a life of its own.

This typical Atwoodian image is repeated in another motif, a clue almost, smuggled into a description of a photograph of the sisters. The pictures shows them on each side of the man they both love, Alex Thomas, a Bolshevik writer of pulp-fiction, and suspected arsonist behind their father's factory fire. But in each of two copies of it, a different sister is cropped away, all except for a hand, scissored at the wrist.

Each sister thus appears to have a hand, literally, in the other's relationship with Alex. And in a neat extension of the pattern, one of these hands writes a second fiction within the outer novel, about a secret, backstreet love affair with him. It is called “The Blind Assassin” after yet a further nested story told by Alex himself to his lover about a cruel, hierarchical people from the planet Zycron who cut out girls' tongues, rape them and sacrifice them to their gods. They also have slave children who go blind weaving intricate carpets, and are then trained to become assassins. Though posthumously published under Laura's name, the authorship of this inner novel is ambiguous. As Iris says: “Laura was my left hand, and I was hers. We wrote the book together. It's a left-handed book.”

Ms Atwood's novel is a playground of elaboration on the themes of women writing women and being written by men. But the sense of self-referral can be suffocating. The self-conscious, genre-fictionalising of the inner stories both gloss and distance the outer story. No doubt that's the point. The outer novel, you could say, is a construct about a construct anyway; about a quasi-Zycronian society where men kill, silence and rape. “All stories”, says Alex, “are about wolves”. But the savagery here is curiously muffled—the rumour of it, rather than the thing itself. Ms Atwood is wonderfully perceptive about the ferocious unsentimentality of childhood and old age. Iris as an old woman and Laura as a child are entirely convincing. But their author is busy with so many devices and so much concept that their impact is dispersed and her own purposes blunted.