Book Group: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

[ninebelow]

With The Unconsoled Kazuo Ishiguro moved away from the period naturalism that made his name. In doing so he lost the critics. He also lost me. I was a great admirer of his wonderful early novels but for fickle reasons to do with thickness and reviews it sat on my shelf unread. He returned to period naturalism with When We Were Orphans which

Comments

[buymeaclue]

My first book group comment. Let's stop for a moment so someone can take a picture. ::sniffle::

Everything is direct to the reader and the text is constantly interupted by such asides.

Is it an interruption, though, if that's how the entire book is written? The reader's put on notice, as you say, by that very first sentence, and the book keeps coming back to it over and over again: this already happened, this is being remembering, this is being told.

(To who? may be a question, but eh, I'm not sure that I care.

I agree that the books fails if it's the revelation is point. But...if the revelation is the point, it fails so spectacularly that I have to think the revelation _isn't_ the point. That it's incidental to what the book is really on about.

(This bugged me less than it may have bugged others because I came pre-spoilered for the revelation and so I was reverse-engineering the story as I read instead of trying to figure out what was going on.)

Perhaps, as Harrison suggests, the novel's purpose is simply to cause the

[ninebelow]

Philosophical differences time! Is that really a simple thing?

Maybe not but I am just boggled that anyone would think this is a good idea. It seems like saying Westlife are as important as The Sex Pistols because they cause a reaction. This is lauding Ishiguro for being delibrately bad which is something I deeply weird. If I needed him to remind me I am alive (which I don't) having a bunch of non-humans imitate the living dead is not the way to do it.

[buymeaclue]

First things first: hee!

I'm not sure, though, that I see it as being deliberately bad. Or bad at all. It's definitely not good in the ways that are often considered good. But--I was utterly sucked in and fascinated, instead of feeling (more often a problem for me) bored and quitting on the book. Which strikes me as evidence of a very skilled juggling act indeed.

[swisstone]

I think your identification of clumsy infodump is probably the same phenomenon K comments upon.

[coalescent]

The whole of Chapter Twenty Two is given over to a fill-in-the-blanks session that is not only ridiculously implausible but very crudely delivered:

Yes. And it's not only implausible, it's not necessary--the book works much better when everything is kept vague. I think I referred to this somewhere as bringing the monster on stage, because I think NLMG is functionally quite a lot like a horror novel.

As in The Remains Of The Day the desires of the character's hearts are hidden and repressed but here there is no societal reason

No societal reason except, er, being brought up and groomed to be that way?

My review from way back when here.

[coalescent]

Oh, and I will say that I think the comparisons with Spares are baffling. The two books have almost nothing in common, and are trying to do completely different things; I don't see much point in comparing them.

[i_ate_my_crusts]

I think the comparison is solely because the primary setup is carers plus clones in both cases, basically. They do head in astoundingly different directions, as you say.

I'm still pondering my response to V for Vendetta and Mortal Love, let alone Never Let Me Go

[ninebelow]

No societal reason except, er, being brought up and groomed to be that way?

Of all the things that are hidden from them sex is not one of them and they are very much equals; class, propriety and the like have no impact on them. In this I do think they are in a very different situation.

You are right that any comparison to Spares is meaningless.

[frandowdsofa]

First thing to say is I enjoyed reading it. Kathy seemed to me to be an accurately voiced character - although I agree she's mostly surface, I didn't get any of this unexpressed rage

[despotliz]

I think you're a little bit harsh on the writing, and it does a decent job of showing these characters who are molded from birth, hidden and repressed as you say. It's one of those books that I can see people might really like and feel for the characters, but I don't.

The other reason for this is that the science fiction aspects of the book are so poorly done, and it hamstrings the whole book. Keeping all the details vague and mysterious until the last-minute infodump only works if you're not keeping all the details vague and mysterious because they don't actually make sense. I have big problems with the clones and the donations - I start wondering whether they have clones for everyone in the country, how and why you would donate your organs in stages, why the rest of society has no problems with this vast army of clones. I realise the worldbuilding is really not the point of the novel, but when it seems to have had so little thought put into it, it distracts me from the rest of the book.

[veggiesu]

You said to let you know when I'd read it, because you wanted to post about it...