![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: Never Let Me Go
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Genre: Literary science fiction/understated horror
Thingummies: 5
Synopsis: Kathy, a nurse, looks back on her childhood in a mysteriously ominous boarding school and tries to connect her memories of her friends to what would later happen to them.
Thoughts: This is a dreamy musing on memory, growing up, and loss of innocence that spirals elegantly around a single, horrifying fact that warps the lives of each of the characters. I was unfortunately spoiled for the grand revelation (which occurs earlier in the book that you might have expected, around the one-third mark)--I rather regret this, as I wish I had been able to properly appreciate the mounting sense of dread the author is clearly trying to establish. I do wonder at what point I would have been able to figure out what was happening.
However, despite that spoiler, the book was not at all spoiled. The fascinating thing is how little the secret actually impacts the emotional arc of the book. Because this world is all the characters have ever known, they accept it and make do as best they can. Their driving goals and emotional trauma are all of the quiet kind you would expect from the author of The Remains of the Day--unsatisfied romantic yearnings, social dueling, attempts to grapple with the end of childhood and the beginning of maturity. In any other author's hand, the world-building would be sensationalistic, ending in triumphant overthrow of the system or grand tragedy. Here, it is only the small tragedies that come to us all--friendships falling apart, people we love dying before we're ready to let them go, the realization that the past is a place you can never return to. The characters could easily be something exotic and bizarre--it is their ordinariness that makes them believable, and loveable despite great flaws.
The world-building does require us to take much on faith. There is a lot that is never explained, possibly because I do not know how one could credibly explain it. Near the end, there are hints that there may be fresh horrors, which are never confirmed. Poke too hard, and it could all come collapsing down. It is not a robust world, but a gossamer one, just strong enough to hang a mirror on. But for the emotional punch of the novel, I think it is sufficient.
This is not a grand story of man's inhumanity to man. It's a small one, of friends' betrayals to friends, and why we might still love them anyway.
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Genre: Literary science fiction/understated horror
Thingummies: 5
Synopsis: Kathy, a nurse, looks back on her childhood in a mysteriously ominous boarding school and tries to connect her memories of her friends to what would later happen to them.
Thoughts: This is a dreamy musing on memory, growing up, and loss of innocence that spirals elegantly around a single, horrifying fact that warps the lives of each of the characters. I was unfortunately spoiled for the grand revelation (which occurs earlier in the book that you might have expected, around the one-third mark)--I rather regret this, as I wish I had been able to properly appreciate the mounting sense of dread the author is clearly trying to establish. I do wonder at what point I would have been able to figure out what was happening.
However, despite that spoiler, the book was not at all spoiled. The fascinating thing is how little the secret actually impacts the emotional arc of the book. Because this world is all the characters have ever known, they accept it and make do as best they can. Their driving goals and emotional trauma are all of the quiet kind you would expect from the author of The Remains of the Day--unsatisfied romantic yearnings, social dueling, attempts to grapple with the end of childhood and the beginning of maturity. In any other author's hand, the world-building would be sensationalistic, ending in triumphant overthrow of the system or grand tragedy. Here, it is only the small tragedies that come to us all--friendships falling apart, people we love dying before we're ready to let them go, the realization that the past is a place you can never return to. The characters could easily be something exotic and bizarre--it is their ordinariness that makes them believable, and loveable despite great flaws.
The world-building does require us to take much on faith. There is a lot that is never explained, possibly because I do not know how one could credibly explain it. Near the end, there are hints that there may be fresh horrors, which are never confirmed. Poke too hard, and it could all come collapsing down. It is not a robust world, but a gossamer one, just strong enough to hang a mirror on. But for the emotional punch of the novel, I think it is sufficient.
This is not a grand story of man's inhumanity to man. It's a small one, of friends' betrayals to friends, and why we might still love them anyway.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-12-06 12:39 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-12-06 11:59 am (UTC)From: