Ishiguro's *Never letting go* which never quite took hold

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

**Spoilers--kind of**

About 50 pages in: It's not terrible so far but I'm struggling...found myself starting two other books including *Hull Zero* by Greg Bear. Maybe I came into Ishiguro with unfair expectations, wanting a book equal to Remains of the Day.......

Well, I made it back to this, skimmed a bit through the middle section, then started reading more carefully about page 200. I can see the beauty in what Ishiguro is trying to do--the first-person narrated by Kathy, a plodding, revisiting kind of narrative where she often goes on tangents and then reorients us back ("The reason I bring this up is because....") to the point. And I do love the accumulative effect of the subtle themes, which oh so slowly accrete until finally there is something solid.

Yet the narrative style felt painfully, molasses-like at times, slow. Many times I thought I'd just skip to the last few chapters or even just call it quits. If I hadn't been on break, and instead in the midst of a busy semester, this book would have been left in a pile somewhere unread. But with time in my favor I did finish it out and the last few chapters were quite compelling as they wrapped together the many themes and plot lines throughout the book--much of this work was to finally, if the reader had any doubts, put to rest all of the rumors these poor children had fabricated, hoping there might be a way out from under their duty.

And here, in the last pages, the book finally feels like a traditional SF dystopia--the questions of what and who has a soul, the adults who have spent their lives working on behalf of these children only to further deceive them, the harrowing inescapability of cruelty for self-preservation. Poignantly in the last pages we see that the "careful hopes" of these "poor creatures" are akin to the very carefully constructed hopes we all have. As Tommy voices after confronting the truth, "It's a shame Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever" (242). That's the hard cold truth, the truth the plodding narrator can't re-examine or re-explain, the truth none of us can be shielded from.

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Hull Zero Three: A disorienting start, but satisfying conclusion

Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I didn't think I was going to like this book--the first 80 pages or so are basically impenetrable. At first the author writes in a style which causes us to experience the disorientation first-hand: "A jerk and an awful sound, like water rushing or blood spurting. Everything's dark and muddled. A little redness creeps into my vision. I'm surrounded by thick liquid..." And this beginning passage is an easy one compared to later when we get complicated and incomplete descriptions of the ship, jumping in anti-gravity rooms filled with human/machine cleaners, body parts, and indescribable stuff.

But as the main character, The Teacher, learns about his birth and purpose, the book picks up and I started to be invested. Deeply layered and embedded themes concerning innocence, language, the usefulness of knowledge, and guilt begin to coalesce. And the plot itself ain't too bad as it unfolds a detailed plan filled with complicated loops and twists to send a ship out to start human life in another star system. This I appreciate because my guess is our first attempts, whenever they might come, to seek out other worlds will be much messier than the usually slick SF space travel gimmicks we get: Star Trek's warp speed, Ursula K. Le Guin's and Orson Scott Card's ansible (instantaneous communication with earth), etc. Instead, my guess, is that Greg Bear has it about right as far as tone--dark, death, cyborgian ambiguity, messy, unpredictable.

My only *big* qualm is that Bear falls for the god/spiritual trope (something silvery) near the end as a plot device. It's not discussed much, but does explain a pivotal plot turn. Too bad as I think he could have simply continued to use the complexity of human motivation and identity to bring us home.

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Not quite enough Character: The Windup Girl by Paolo Baciagalupi

I really wanted to like this book, but it never quite worked for me. Started it once, then reread the first 70 pages or so in order to give it another go. Yet... I did find the Windup girl, an android which reminded me of Rachel from *Do androids dream of electric sheep*, an engaging and sympathetic character. But just when the novel started to explore the ambiguities and paradoxes of android life, the plot moves away from her and instead gives us like 150 pages of political futuristic intrigue and revolution. I simply didn't care about the outcome or the characters...and the characters I did care about--Windup and Hock Seng (a Chinese man who lost his fortune living covertly in Thailand), get lost in all the political calorie stuff. It IS an amazing world that Bacigalupi creates but even in a fascinating dystopic Thailand where the US has lost its power, characters (yes CHARACTERS) still matter most.

Prisoner of Zion by Scott Carrier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I purchased this book for full price (a rare thing for me) right after hearing Scott Carrier read from the book at our faculty convention. He is an interesting character, hard to define into a neat category--and so is this book.

Even if I hadn't heard him speak, I would have known this was going to be a good read just 14 pages in, during the 3rd section called Momosphere, where he says "I used to resist the church. I spoke out against it whenever...I had a chance. But one day a question entered my head--'What if, with the wave of a hand, I could wipe out all of Mormon history...would I do it?' It took me five seconds to realize I would never do it. I'd miss their stories for their mythic value. I'd miss the temple, even though I can't go inside...My identity, the person I have become, is a non-Mormon, an outsider other. If the Mormons were gone then who would I be?"

This passage identifies what I respect in Carrier and seek in others: someone whose life experiences have made them less (not more) likely to sweep aside some culture or belief system which is irritating, wrong, even unjust and discriminatory. To me this is to recognize our interconnections and that meaning is never solid, a modernized object, but rather rhizomatic, tenuous, and corrupted by sin.

Carrier jumps back and forth from stories about Utah and Mormons to that of Islam in the Middle East--interesting parallels if uneven and stretched at times. But then he brings the two strands of fundamentalism together in the last and best section (the one he read from at our convention): "Najibullah in America." It is the story of young boy he meets in Afghanistan, who translates for him and helps Carrier get his stories. Several years later, now at UVU as a professor, Carrier gets Naji to come to Utah, to live amidst another kind of fundamentalism.

The last section might be called the education of Naji AND of Scott Carrier as he helps Naji navigate life in America and to write in a new language with new rules of engagement. But it's also about Carrier's learning as he "settles" for a time as a teacher, at first hating it and then growing to like it even though he is still surrounded by young idealistic and naive Mormons. But the convention is too much for him ultimately--he said in his reading that he is leaving UVU, and the comforts of a salary and health insurance, for the Middle East. I'm both fascinated and bewildered by a person like Carrier who lives on the fringes. Ultimately happy for his voice.

A voice that ends on a somewhat, for Carrier, optimistic note. He argues that there is something going on with his students, having seen the financial crisis and murky motivations for war, who "now come more willing to listen to [his] point of view because they can see they're fucked." A mini-enlightenment in Orem, Utah? Maybe. Still, he admits to the complex forces in a uniquely Carrier-like way: "It's fucking hard to be compassionate, to see our enemy as no different than ourselves."

And here we circle back: Who indeed would Carrier be without the Mormons? Who would Christian Westerners be without Islam? Even who would we be without Al-Queda? Compassion is certainly absolutely fucking hard.

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The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book took me a bit to get into. 86 pages I emailed my young friend who had recommended it:

"But I must quickly ask for help with The Folk Keeper. I’m 86 pages in and…not that engaged. So what am I not seeing? What do you see? I do see the that Billingsley has worked hard to create a believable setting in that time period. And I do see the evolving tensions and parallels between Corrina and Finnian. And I enjoy the little surprises like her desire to eat raw fish. Overall I like the idea of the young strong girl passing as a boy. Still, I find myself, as I have done with other fantasy novels, lacking emotional engagement amidst all the fantasy tropes—magical powers, details of historical setting, rituals etc."

But then the next time I read, one-page later in fact, I found what I was hoping for and wrote back to my friend:

"I just found the poetry in The Folk Keeper. Reading in the quiet, everyone asleep (well not Seth as he sleeps little at night) and finally got in groove while reading about her and the sea, 'I was born in reverse, exploded from one medium into another, from air into liquid, from dawn into darkness; (87) And then when she gets angry at Finian for going out to sea without her, we get this wonderful image: 'I wanted to pluck the plug from that basin and watch him drain into the center of the world' (96). Very nice.

It reminded me a bit of M.C. Higgins the Great by Virginia Hamilton--do you know the novel? A great book which I always have to remind students to read slowly and not be bothered by the lack of traditional plot. Guess I have to take some of my own advice with the Folk keeper."

A lyrical, patient, beautiful book. And a reminder of the importance of patient reading in quiet places.



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