Never let me go
Apr. 26th, 2006 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkI read a book.
"Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro
The first Ishiguro I read “An Artist of the Floating World” was wonderful. “Remains of the Day” seemed the same thing but longer and not so compelling. Too close to home maybe, both books focus on emotionally stunted protagonists coming to terms with their pasts but the exotic location in the first book helped to leaven the flatness and restraint of the central character.
“Never Let me Go” has structural similarities with the two earlier novels. Once again an emotionally stunted narrator reviews his/her life while gradually the layers of a terrible secret are peeled away. In the new book, however, the protagonist is not an old man coming to terms with his regrets but a young woman. There’s a connection being drawn here between youth and old age perhaps, both liminal, powerless states. The secret being revealed is that this young woman, Cathy, is a clone bred as a source of organ replacement. So she’s an innocent victim not a fellow traveler or unwitting accomplice. The clone plot element may sound like science fiction but in sf terms the novel is a complete failure. There is no real attempt to make scientific or sociologic sense of a world in which children like Cathy and her school mates are bred simply to donate vital organs. More the idea of them being clones, their copied lives laid out for them from the beginning, works as a metaphor. The Ishiguroian protagonist taken to its logical extreme.
The power of the book, and by the end it had me entirely in its grip, lies in the way his imitations of characters, mere shadows of reality, with their cliched, mundane language and stultifyingly narrow experiences yet struggle to reach out and create human bonds. Dimly like plants grown in darkness, nevertheless by the end they appear to succeed. By the final paragraph, in which the narrator imagines her friend Tommy running towards her through a windswept field in Norfolk, her life has somehow acquired the power of one of the great stories of love and loss. A bonsai romance, miniature and yet deeply moving.
"Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro
The first Ishiguro I read “An Artist of the Floating World” was wonderful. “Remains of the Day” seemed the same thing but longer and not so compelling. Too close to home maybe, both books focus on emotionally stunted protagonists coming to terms with their pasts but the exotic location in the first book helped to leaven the flatness and restraint of the central character.
“Never Let me Go” has structural similarities with the two earlier novels. Once again an emotionally stunted narrator reviews his/her life while gradually the layers of a terrible secret are peeled away. In the new book, however, the protagonist is not an old man coming to terms with his regrets but a young woman. There’s a connection being drawn here between youth and old age perhaps, both liminal, powerless states. The secret being revealed is that this young woman, Cathy, is a clone bred as a source of organ replacement. So she’s an innocent victim not a fellow traveler or unwitting accomplice. The clone plot element may sound like science fiction but in sf terms the novel is a complete failure. There is no real attempt to make scientific or sociologic sense of a world in which children like Cathy and her school mates are bred simply to donate vital organs. More the idea of them being clones, their copied lives laid out for them from the beginning, works as a metaphor. The Ishiguroian protagonist taken to its logical extreme.
The power of the book, and by the end it had me entirely in its grip, lies in the way his imitations of characters, mere shadows of reality, with their cliched, mundane language and stultifyingly narrow experiences yet struggle to reach out and create human bonds. Dimly like plants grown in darkness, nevertheless by the end they appear to succeed. By the final paragraph, in which the narrator imagines her friend Tommy running towards her through a windswept field in Norfolk, her life has somehow acquired the power of one of the great stories of love and loss. A bonsai romance, miniature and yet deeply moving.