Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Booker short-listed. Doreen thinks this is the sort of book you
admire and don't like. Very cold. A peculiar story - the person
telling it should be enraged but is not. The narrator and her
friends are clones bred to provide organs for transplant when
they get older. They accept their fate. Nobody seems to think it
is bad. Doreen couldn't believe it because the children are not
totally cut off from the world. Creepy because it is told in the
first person.
Doreen 11/9/05
I was quite intrigued by the concept of people being cloned for
organ transplants. A work of real imagination. It's told in the
first person and it felt claustrophobic. I couldn't guess what
would happen. Surprisingly, the book is set in the very recent
past. The clones are treated in the way we used to treat disabled
people i.e. shut them away.
Gill 9/10/05
Andrew wished several things about this book. He wished that he
hadn't already known so much of the story or the identity of the
author. Would he, he wondered, have persevered with it? He found
the opening few chapters with their description of teenagers at
some kind of special educational establishment and all the 'who
said what to whom' stuff a bit boring really and it was only
knowing that Ishiguro was behind it that made him think 'well,
something a bit sinister must be going on then...' Andrew
disagreed with Doreen in the debate over the author's reputation
for coldness - he didn't find anything creepy about the voice of
the narrator - a bit stilted perhaps but no more so than anyone
who'd been raised in an institutional environment. If Andrew got
into conversation with her at a party he wouldn't think she was
that strange. Ishiguro's concept is ghoulish for sure but his
telling of it did not strike Andrew as being overly clinical.
Andrew 6/11/05
A book about people being raised to provide organs for donation.
The typical donor makes about three or four donations before
“completing”, their euphemism for dying. It's
initially set in a boarding school where the kids are raised, and
follows the narrator through school and out into the world at
large. It's a subject that could easily give rise to strong
emotions and anger, and clearly the author has deliberately
avoided that.
It's a very cold book, with little emotion. Seán rarely
felt emotionally involved – the exception being when Kathy,
the narrator, is ordered to make what will almost certainly be
her final donation, and thereby denied more time with her lover.
Seán was desperate for some resistance or anger on her
part, but nowhere in the book are there any signs even of
questioning by the donors. Nor are there any indications of how
donors are treated if they refuse to comply – Kathy is
living in the world at large, with her own car and flat, and we
are given no idea of what would happen if she refused her final
appointment.
Seán didn't really get any clear message from the book,
but Doreen said it's simple: “You live, you die, that's
it.”
Seán 4/6/06
By the same author
The frames have
gone all funny - click to make it good.