Everybody lies

posted on Sunday, February, 11th, 2007 in reading matter

Since reading this book a week or so ago I must have changed my mind about it a dozen times at least.

Of course I was aware before even starting to read it, that it is hyped as a bestseller and was nominateed for a Booker Prize and whatnot. While I was reading it, I wasn’t quite overwhelmed, but I liked Ishiguro’s way of writing and thought the story was original and got it’s point across quite clearly.Then, after finishing it I started to think about it and discovered a few things that kept bugging me.

Then I read a discussion about it on Bookcrossing, I read quite a few of the reviews on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk and I read an interview with Ishiguro himself, and suddenly I understood all the people who said it was one of the worst books they ever read.

I’m usually not quite as impressionable with other people’s opinion, but this is an unusual book and it is not quite easy to make up my mind about.

The story itself is easily told (don’t read this, if you want to avoid spoilers!): The place is England in the 1990s. Meet Kathy, a 31-year-old woman, who tells us about her youth spent at a boarding school named Hailsham. She reminisces about her 2 best friends, the manipulative (and, frankly, not very likeable) Ruth and Tommy, who at first seems to be a bit retarded (I still don’t know if that was intentional).

At first, this seems to be just another coming-of-age story, but little by little the reader begins to notice something strange going on, little weirdnesses tucked between the everyday routines. The students don’t seem to have family names, or even families. The place is teeming with inexplicaple unwritten rules, seemingly meaningless rituals, and overprotective teachers called guardians.

As the kids grow up and leave Hailsham at 16, they don’t have a normal future. They all know that soon they are gonna become carers, and later donors. Carers of what? And donors of what?

It becomes clear after a while, that these kids are clones. Bred for only one purpose: to have their vital organs harvested for transplantation into “normal people”. This happens usually in up to 4 operations, in between which the donors are cared for by their assigned carers. After the fourth donation the donor usually “completes” – an awful euphemism for dying, if I ever heard one.

Throughout the book we follow the lives of Kathy, Tommy and Ruth through their seemingly, but not quite, wonderful childhood, adolescence and lives after Hailsham right up to their deaths. At the end of the book only Kathy is still alive – and looking forward to start her first donation soon.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Does that sound like a creepy science-fiction story? It is. And then again it isn’t.

The mood is definitely creepy – or maybe sinister is a better word. It’s also pretty much without any shred of hope, which is quite depressing, really.

But it is not really sci/fi in that the aspect of the cloning is never fully explained, but only hinted at in passing. So, the actual science is more or less missing – which was a point that apparently annoyed many readers, me included.

But you see, the thing is, complaining about the science (or lack thereof) in this book completely misses the point. This is not a book about a parallel universe or something. It is a book about the human condition – right here in this world of ours. The fact that we don’t clone people (yet) is irrelevant.

This is what Mr. Ishiguro himself had to say about this point:

With “Never Let Me Go” I knew from the start that I didn’t want to write a story about an enslaved, exploited class that would then rebel. My subject matter wasn’t going to be the triumph of the human spirit. I was interested in the human capacity to accept what must seem like a limited and cruel fate.

So this story raises several weighty questions:

• Is destiny assured?
• Are our fates inevitable, or can we do something to change them?
• And if we could, would we have the courage to do it?
• What is the nature of human relationships?
• Is every human being born equal, or are some more worthy than others?
• For that matter, what does it mean to be human?

Where the cloning angle comes into play is that it brings the characters a certain awareness of their destiny that normal people just don’t have.

This is a book about passivity and innocent dreams. It is also a book of no escape. It is about so many things–the relationship of humanity to its clones, certainly, but also the lies we tell ourselves just to survive, the trivialities with which we mislead ourselves in our interactions with others and ourselves, the desperation with which we cling to our fantasies of love, family, humanity, and belonging, and the utter inability we face far too often to interpret our pasts in any way that helps us with our futures.

Some of the amazon reviewers said it better than I ever could:

This is a dark tale of human beings being treated as less than human beings, of human clones grown and nurtured for the sole purpose of harvesting their organs, and their less than humane treatment, even though in appearances humane, based on various societal biases or perhaps only less than clear thinking, or faulty value systems. Indeed, this is Ishiguro’s mastery. He has given something very dark, some might say evil, a face so bland it goes almost unnoticed. And, isn’t this how evil pervades society every day? Monsters are rarely big and green and warty. Strangers are often your favorite uncle, or the boy next door. The taking down of civilization is not done with a big bang, but with nibbles and bites, a gradual desensitization. Ishiguro’s evil is seemingly meek and submissive, as if done for the wellbeing of the masses, and that may arguably be the tactic used most successfully. In novels as well as in life.

In this case, the observation is similar to that made by Ishiguro in his earlier works: namely, it is easier, but emptier, to live a life where the rules of living have been defined. By showing the barrenness of a life where obedience is a substitute for emotion, Ishiguro argues that people should challenge assumptions and define their own lives before they lose the capacity to make those changes.

More accurately, they learn that all of them have one definite future, as if they were cattle with awareness. So the entire tone of the novel, at several depths, is detachment. Because the individual and collective future of donors is a given, they are not very attached to any person (including “normals” they may have sex with), to any endeavor, to any accomplishment except caring, to any possession, to their own feelings or indeed to any choice. From the earliest age their life is to Let Go. That is the singular sentiment made concrete by 250 pages in Kathy’s voice.

The characters in “Never Let Me Go” have all of the hopes and dreams of normal human beings, but are too afraid to go after them and make them a reality. They willingly give themselves up to the lives that have been set for them because it is all that they know and all that they have been prepared for their whole lives. To step outside of that box never really crosses their minds because they are too terrified to consider the consequences of doing so.

But of course, as deep and touching all that may be, there actually are some points that still bug me (and not only me!).

I see that the cloning and all its surrounding logistics are not meant to be important. Ishiguro himself said the cloning was an afterthought, just used to create a background for the really important thoughts.

That may be as it will, but even then the scenario should still be thought through in all its implications. Which it clearly isn’t in this case. Factwise this story got holes you could drive a truck through.

• Why are the clones raised in an approximately normal manner? It would be so much easier to just have them lobotomized or put on tranquilizers and keep them in big institutions, where normal people don’t have to actually see them.
• Why are they educated at all? (It’s not like they could take a normal job anyway.)
• After leaving Hailsham, how do the clones make a living? Do they get paid for being a carer?
• Why is not one of them getting the idea to just run away? I know, this is one of the points Ishiguro is making, but it is just unrealistic as hell.
• Why is nobody harvested as a child? Surely in this world normal children get cancer sometimes or have accidents?
• Why are the rules the way they are? What happens to people who break them?
• What is the carer-system good for? I would assume actually seeing your friends waste away and die might breed a little rebelliousness in the meekest of clones. It is just not normal to accept such a fate so quietly.
• What exactly makes them visibly recognizable as clones? Or do they look just like everybody else?

Somehow I just have problems to accept all these things just as quietly. It doesn’t seem realistic or logical and as such just pisses me off. I think, being the brilliant writer he is, Ishiguro could have and should have thought all these issues through and not glossed them over by leaving the reader to puzzle out possible explanations for all this by himself.

Then again, this story being meant to be metaphorical and not taken literally, maybe there is not really a need to be too specific in the details. The book does resonate on a deep level, and if you’re not a complete moron or deliberately obtuse, it does get its point across – even if you (like me) might not be able to actually articulate this point later on. So, maybe it is not exactly necessary for this world Ishiguro dreams up to be entirely believable around the fringes.

See, this is what I meant about changing my mind all the time. I did it again…