#10: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

[veleda-k.livejournal.com]

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro


I wanted to like this book more than I did. And there is plenty to like. The writing is dense, but never incomprehensible or distracting, the characters are realistic and flawed, but never quite made the slip into "I hate these people and want them to die." And the premise is fantastic, just the sort of thing to grab me.

The book is told through the memories of the main character, which she tries to piece together with the help of her best friends. Unlike many books told from characters memories, Ishiguro realizes how memory works. Kathy pieces together her past from the clues and glimpses that she remembers. She and her friends remember the same event happening at different times. Sometimes Kathy can't remember why something seemed so important, only that it was. I found this refreshing after so many stories in which the characters' memories are infallible.

I have two main problems with the book. I'll admit that both of these are very much my personal issues, and that other people may not be bothered. One, there's a distinct lack of world building. More and more is revealed as the book goes on (please note: this is a slow paced book), however there are countless gaps. What was so different about this version of history that humanity discovered the ability to clone human beings in the 1950's? Exactly how do the clones keep donating their organs without dying right away? Some of them do, but which nonessential organs are they giving to cancer patients that allows the clones to live through four separate organ removals?

Plenty of people would tell me that I'm missing the point. This isn't hard scifi. The scifi elements only exist to hold up the characters. But while I respect that sometimes an author only wants to show you enough to accept the basics of the world, I found my suspension of disbelief stretched here.

I'll admit that my last issue is entirely personal to me. No one in this book ever considers running away. No one really objects to the terrible unfairness of people being created for the sole purpose of being carved up and taken apart until they die. It's called organ donation, but no one's donating, they're being robbed. The characters don't like their situation but they never question it. And it seems that they have reason to. They're raised in an almost normal school, they go on trips across the country, they live for many years before starting their donations. They live almost normal lives, yet never once does any character turn to another and say, "Hey, we're just like everyone else, so why are we forced to live this way, being treated as disposable, as nothing more than a resource for 'real' people to use?"

If there had been a clearer reason for the total lack of hope it would have been more effective, because, yes, I can see how tragic it is that the most any of the characters hope for is a few years of deferral, but I would have liked someone to be at least marginally rebellious, because in my opinion they didn't have any reason not to be. (And all right, I'll admit it, because I personally find characters who fight fate more interesting than characters who are little more than cows led to the slaughter.)

Comments

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I have the same caveats about Never Let Me Go that you do, and furthermore... I think the fact that this book is meant to be literary fiction as opposed to SF hurt it in its conception. I think if the book/its author had admitted it was SF and thus had been inspired to fill in more of the blank spaces of worldbuilding, it would have been a better book (or at least not left me saying "but but but...").

[veleda-k.livejournal.com]

I've been reading some reviews of the book, and I've found some praising the lack of world building, as if not including scifi elements makes it a better book. I figure it's the normal slighting of genre fiction, but it still seems foolish to me to praise an author for leaving so much out. Because, seriously, I can't even begin to figure out how Ishiguro's alternate history works.

[erinlin.livejournal.com]

I found the fact that they never even thought to run made everything that much sadder and creepier.

[veleda-k.livejournal.com]

That's pretty clearly what Ishiguro was going for, and reading reviews it obviously worked for plenty of people. I just didn't find it believable. Not one single character in the entire book--no matter how minor--ever expresses even the slightest sense of injustice. That just doesn't seem human to me. If people are oppressed, at least some of them will object. Maybe very few of them and frequently not successfully, but somebody somewhere will make an effort.

I'm not even demanding that Kathy or Tommy should have staged a rebellion. One or two lines about a donor who tried to escape and was caught would have made things better.

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

I felt that the whole book was about what it would take for someone to totally acquiesce to a position of being completely dehumanized, of not even thinking of themself as fully human, to knowingly consent to a life that seems intolerable: the slowness, the emphasis on the small conflicts of school, etc, exist to me in order to underline the way they're being raised to live in a 'normality' that perpetrates their own disposability. The creepiest thing about Hailsham is the fact that it tries to give them a certain quality of life *without* humanizing them (I disagree that it's a 'normal' school). I feel like the novel is asking what it would take to realize a pretty much perfect form of oppression, by basically removing all capacity for structural criticism and only leaving the individual dream of love etc.

The scientific worldbuilding issues I agree with, but I found I didn't mind because the psychological and ideological worldbuilding held up so well for me. I don't actually find that absence of resistance to be at all likely, but Ishiguro makes me believe in it.

[veleda-k.livejournal.com]

You're right that Hailsham isn't a normal school. I was mainly mentally comparing it to the other environments for clones that we only hear about.

Hailsham isn't a normal school, but I disagree that it perpetuates a sense of disposability. Or it would be more accurate to say that that's not all it does. Yes, the students are conditioned to understand that they will eventually be nothing more than meat for those deemed more worthy. However, their individuality is heavily emphasized. Most obvious is their art and poetry, but the sales and exchanges all create a sense of difference: I want things that you don't want, I have things that you don't have. The guardians show favoritism, or at least the students think they do.

The students are also not isolated. They can go on trips to the outside world, where nobody notices that they're clones, and treat them as regular people.

I'll admit that I'm not an expert in breaking people's spirits and making them feel subhuman, but encouraging individuality and personal expression and allowing plenty of outside contact seems an unlikely way to do it. And as I said above, I'm not demanding a full on revolution, but nothing about Hailsham seems quite so demoralizing as to prevent even one single solitary person from questioning if it's right.

Reading reviews and other comments, I can tell my view is not the most common one, which is fine. I'd rather have people enjoy the book than hate it. And I will fully admit again that it's largely personal preference. I think passive characters are unsatisfying characters. The future of humanity may be a boot stamping on a human face forever, but I'd rather read about a person who tries to stand up, however unsuccessfully, than a person who lies there, docile, idly wishing the boot treads weren't quite so sharp.

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

I'm not an expert in breaking people's spirits and making them feel subhuman, but encouraging individuality and personal expression and allowing plenty of outside contact seems an unlikely way to do it

The one thing I think is really missing and odd is that we don't see the clones having *media* contact, knowing how they are represented. For the rest of it––what I was getting at was the idea that people could be socialized into comfort and happiness with a subhuman status, such that at the end of the book Kathy can look at her life and say that she doesn't see why it was so much worse than anybody else's. I think that kind of acceptance does come from her having lived in a cage with fairly well gilded bars.

Anyway, I don't want to annoy you by arguing on and on! I respect your take on the book and can see where you are coming from. I am a bit fascinated by narratives that don't follow the standard dystopian track of resistance, so Never Let Me Go speaks to me on that level, though I'd hate this to be the only story being told.

[veleda-k.livejournal.com]

I'm definitely not annoyed! I'm just don't want to annoy you.

It's been interesting to hear why the book worked for other people, and it's definitely a point of view I respect.

I am a bit fascinated by narratives that don't follow the standard dystopian track of resistance

Heh, and I am a complete sucker for that kind of plot, which explains a lot.