Never Let Me Go by Kazuo IshiguroMy 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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2 comments:
I read this a few years ago. I couldn't tell you much about the plot, but I remember the feeling of reading the book. Slow and elegiac. I think I read it during a summer visit from Canada, in my mom's backyard, which might be part of the reason I remember liking it. The settings where I read books always affect how I feel about the book.
The book really, for some reason, just got me. I think that plodding narrator, with such a carefully cultivated "artful" style of narration, ultimately just broke my heart. I read an article or an interview with Ishiguro, where he said that ultimately, the SF dystopic elements were less important to him than the questions about loneliness and love and the soul. I think that's what got me. The world of the book exacerbates what could be said to be at least one version of the human condition. Anyway, I found the book very moving and I read it pretty much straight through, stopping here and there to cry about it. I agree with Lis's characterization--slow and elegiac.
Thanks for asking me to think about iit again.
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