Book Group: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
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
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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 reader to rebel against its sterility.
Philosophical differences time! Is that really a simple thing?
The interesting thing to me (and the thing that I think may speak to your comments about the characters) is--how thoroughly the kids accepted not just their fate but everything. And how aware it makes the reader (just me?) of wanting to be active in the world.
I'm with Harrison's second-last paragraph more than his last.
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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.
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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.
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