Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A Truly Organic Experience, 4 Feb 2005
Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel, the hauntingly titled Never Let Me Go, is much more straightforward than most of his books, and more fully comprehensible than any since The Remains of the Day. For me the fact that for once Ishiguro has a B-movie style scene where one character explains to another everything that has happened, was a weakness; and yet there is still enough lightness of detail and wealth of moral ambiguity to justify much strokey-chin thought after the last page has been closed, and even to warrant an early re-read. The setting of the book is "England, late 1990s," but not as we know it. We can tell this even from the limited narrative offered by Kathy, who tells us very little of the real world outside her immediate (and past) environs. There are words dropped innocently but sinisterly: 'donations,' 'carers,' 'completing,' none of which have the meanings we understand. Kathy was a student at Hailsham, a residential institution for children which educated them and encouraged creative expression, but was not quite a school... They are being prepared for lives as 'carers' and 'donors', and they are a form of experiment made possible by advances in technology which, in this parallel world, came in the 1950s but which we are only seeing now. To say more than this would ruin the story, as there are two mighty coups of revelation delivered about a quarter and halfway through the book, which resonate through the rest of the story and are quite impossible to free from your mind. After this, there is perhaps less mystery than we would expect from Ishiguro, which is disappointing but necessary to enable him to explore the characters' reactions to the truth of their world in full. Seasoned readers of his novels will be slightly surprised by the relatively informal tone of Kathy's voice, and her willingness to talk about things like sex (has *any* Ishiguro character *ever* done so before?), though the familiar languid phrasing and unrushed delivery is all present and correct. Ishiguro has delivered another reliably fine confection in Never Let Me Go, perhaps without the pixel-perfect wondrousness of The Remains of the Day, or the mad beauty of The Unconsoled, but with more accessibility than any of his other books and, despite the unruffled surface, a cast iron certainty to perform open heart surgery on any reader who's got one to give.
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Interesting enough to persevere, and a little haunting., 18 Nov 2007
I was impressed by the literary skill and stylistic aplomb of the author, certainly this is a well written novel. It is I think meant to proceed like a normal story, with just enough hints that somehting is radically different to what the reader should expect. Unfortunately I found the hints to be ruddy big clangers and was pretty sure long before the end of the book what actually was going on. Perhaps I have read too much dystopian science fiction and could therefore recognise themes and the like. Perhaps I was merely experiencing what the characters did. As the narrator tells us, while they learned about their lives and their purposes slowly, what they discovered was never particualry shocking as in one sense they had always known, and their sense of normalcy was built upon this. The narrator lives in the world of late 1990s England - a different England for her and people like her, too be sure, but still a world we as readers know. Yet she moves through it like a stage set so inculcated and educated into her peculiar role and reality that other than the one group myth concerning true love, there is no connection to external reality (and no protest). So perhaps Ishiguro's subtlety was shown in this: by the time each denouement came, the reader was so prepared for it that it seemed the only reasonable explanation, and thus 'always knowm'
The story is told by one of the chartacters, Cathy, and largely progresses through a combination of her own thoughts and her relationships with other characters. The characters are drawn well and were sympathetic enough (especially Tommy the misfit) for me at least to read through to the end even though I was sure what the end would be.
Ultimately there is a serious issue at the core of this novel, and that is the issue of prejudice, "otherness" and what it means to be human, and how we can in turn justify inhumanity to others by making effectively invisible metaphysical distinctions among people. Readers of Phillip K Dick will have been exposed to this before, but that doesn't detract. This is a haunting issue, and one to be much pondered. A secondary theme is the power of education, imposing an ideology, which the victims can come to accept as their reality and make their own, effectively gaining their consent and participation in their victimhood. Again, not a new theme in either in literature or theory, but well worth introducing so subtly and with such beautiful writing. In many ways I liked the book, but I would not read it again. So, only three stars.
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