Reading 1001 discussion

The first book I read by Kazuo Ishiguro was An Artist of the Floating World. My mum bought it for me from the book club man who used to visit the library where she worked. It transported me and led me to other books by Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans. I haven't read anything by him for years, so I thought I'd give Never Let Me Go a try, since it's on The List!

If Never Let Me Go can be classified as sci-fi, then it's the kind of sci-fi that I like - something that could feasibly happen in a setting that I can imagine myself existing in. The setting of this novel seemed like a parallel universe to ours. I don't know that it is sci-fi, though. The science fiction aspects aren't to the fore in the plot. I think it's more about the slowly creeping realisation that life isn't quite what we would like it to be, or what we think it is, which is a universal experience. It's also about trying to find meaning in life, and trying to delay the inevitable, to grasp a few more precious moments that might help you to understand what the point of it all was.

As with the other Ishiguro novels I've read, I liked the gentle pace and the way the story murmurs along. It's similar to the first of his books I read, in that we only hear the voice of a single narrator, someone who occasionally acknowledges that her perspective might not be accurate or a correct reading of what happened. She's not an unreliable narrator in the same way as Ono in An Artist of the Floating World, though. She isn't deluded about what her life has been or become.

I enjoyed the way she told the story, as well, floating from present to past, allowing one memory to trigger another, being side tracked, and occasionally speaking to the reader directly, as though we have potentially shared her experiences.

The premise of the story is revealed slowly, at a pace with the way the characters gradually learn the truth in their youth and assimilate it into their adulthood. That slow build also meant that my empathy for the characters developed slowly. The book is in three sections, and at each transition point I felt more involved in the characters' lives.

I thought that Ishiguro managed to inhabit the mind of a young girl, through her teenage years, and into adulthood, very well. The school scenes seemed very realistic to me, with the cliques and intrigues, and the obsession with collecting things. It seemed a lot like my school experience, except I didn't go to a boarding school so had a daily escape from the others in my class.

There was something intriguingly blank about the way the characters reacted to everyday things. As though they had been so sheltered from the rest of the world that they weren't properly socialised. They are quite naive in some ways, and very unfazed by life in others. Maybe it was the narrator who wasn't fully socialised and the blankness of her narration made everyone else seem blank, too. Everything is reported in a very matter of fact way. There is reflection on past events, and past thinking about events, but there is never a dramatic change in opinion, merely a ponderous acceptance that perhaps she didn't have the necessary experience to fully judge a situation back when it happened. Her reactions and processing of things made me think of the way people with autism react to and process things. As though her experience of life was being filtered through a prism with a different angle of deviation to everyone else's.

The reactions of the people at the Cottages to the Hailsham students were interesting. They made me think of the reactions many people in Britain have to people who have attended boarding school or one of the Oxbridge colleges - as though there is something inherently magical about them, but also something to distrust. Hailsham seems to have a certain mystique for those who weren't educated there. There are also suggestions that people from the outside world have a cushioning reaction to the students, again similar to the way some people react patronisingly to people who have some form of physical or mental disability.

I was curious about the origins of the students at Hailsham. There is no reference to a life before they joined the school, no suggestion that they were ever babies, or who looked after them before they joined the school. The same is true of the people they encounter after they leave the school, except that there's no real hint about their lives before they are joined by the Hailsham group. The earliest discussion of their "Possibilities" hints that they were created as school age children, that they didn't have a pre-school existence.

I felt sad as their lives progressed and changed. Hailsham was an almost womb-like environment, where they had each other's understanding if not real love and affection. The Cottages were a staging post, a point of transfer where they prepared to live without that close network. Then they were out in the world, isolated somewhat, living alone, doing what they were destined to do. There was a subtle horror about it. It made me think of things I've read in the media about children who go through the care system, whose family network breaks down, so that they lose out on childhood and become self reliant, and often untrusting. Love and affection are the things that get us through life. To be deprived of them, to be denied a family, seems a cruel thing.

4 stars
4 Jan 2018

Kazuo Ishiguro has a wonderful mastery on language and uses it with a quiet subtlety. I watched a short video of him discussing this book and what he spoke about is exactly why I loved the book. He put these young characters in a terrible situation, reminiscent of the story in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. But we didn't see escape attempts, or horrible abuses. He spoke of the idea that the characters are passive and that he wanted to explore passivity in human nature. I am so glad he did as I think it is very real. The way the Nazi's controlled the German people, the rest of Europe and even a large portion of the Jews of Europe was to exploit that tendency of humanity to remain passive. I see it in today's world too. We often say "why didn't they try to escape?" But we rarely look inside ourselves and ask whether we would really do that ourselves.

I wish I could love this author's work as much as do others. This is probably one of my favorites but honestly I just can't seem to connect with his work.

Read: October 2, 2009
Rating 5 stars
Review: This book written in 2005 by Kazuo Ishiguro takes place in Britain in the 1900s. The story begins with some children living in a place called Hailsham. At first it is like a boarding school but as the story progresses things are slowly revealed that lets the reader know things are idyllic. The story is told by Kathy, who is 31 at the time she is telling the story. The story is dystopian because this is a society that is not idyllic. It is ethical because while this is fiction it could really be true and that brings forth all kinds of ethical dilemmas. Is it okay to always be searching for that which will improve and lengthen our lives. As the book says, once you go there you can't return.

This is a story along the lines of Hazards of Time Travel(Oates), a creepy world in which innocent children are forced to serve the twisted dystopian society they live in no matter how self-destructive that service might be. And, because their fates are irrelevant or even serve to bolster the power of those in charge, there is quite possibly no way out. This is not a story in which teens, or the adults they grow into, rise up to save the day. Good does not triumph over evil, after all, at least not from the perspectives of the main characters.
Outside the creepy sci-fi storyline, this book is also about friendship, especially female friendships, and reminds me a lot of Atwood's Cat's Eye. In both stories the main character starts out with a small group of female friends as a child, including one dominant, bullying friend against whom the main character is powerless. In this story Kathy loses out on an important relationship because of Ruth, her bully-friend, but in some ways she still comes out ahead of Ruth, as much as any of them could be said to be really ahead.
I gave this book 5 stars on Goodreads.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
5 stars

I really enjoy Ishiguro’s writing. This is the second book by the author that I have read and I really enjoyed it. The story itself is really unique which is what gave it the 5th star for me. I learned a new vocabulary and these simple words now have new meaning: donations, carer, possibles, guardian, modeled and completed. I had watched the movie years ago so I knew the main plot twist and I wish the movie would not put it in the description. I am looking forward to a re-watch also. Ishiguro has 3 more books on the list and I am looking forward to all of them.