Regular readers will know that I am not a fan of Margaret Atwood, and tend to be rather hard on her, but her recent Slate review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, Never Let Me Go is spot on, in the sense that the review is genuinely about Ishiguro and his work, and provides what seems like an honest and fair assessment of the novel. (Those who are not regular readers should know that several months ago I accussed her of being completely unable to meet those criteria in at least one other book review.)
Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day was a brilliant novel, and Never Let Me Go also looks quite interesting. Atwood writes:
The book is also about our tendency to cannibalize others to make sure we ourselves get a soft ride. Ursula Le Guin has a short story called The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, in which the happiness of the many depends absolutely on the arranged unhappiness of the few, and Never Let Me Go could be read as a sister text: The children of Hailsham are human sacrifices, offered up on the altar of improved health for the population at large. With babies already being created with a view to their organs—help for an afflicted sibling, for instance—the dilemma of the Hailsham “students” is bound to become more general. Who owns your body? Who therefore is entitled to offer it up? The reluctance of Kathy H. and her pals to really confront what awaits them—pain, mutilation, death—may account for the curious lack of physicality of Kathy’s descriptions of their life. Nobody eats anything much in this book, nobody smells anything. We don’t know much about what the main characters look like. Even the sex is oddly bloodless. But landscapes, buildings, and the weather are intensely present. It’s as if Kathy has invested a lot of her sense of self in things quite far away from her own body, and thus less likely to be injured.
