Spoilers! There’s a lot going on in this book that can’t be dealt with unless you give away the major “surprise” of the book (although at this point I really doubt it’s much of a surprise). But if you haven’t read the book yet, or heard the buzz and would rather approach it with a clean slate, turn away now. Everybody else, here goes: the narrator and most of the other main characters (the “students” at the Hailsham boarding school) are clones created so their organs can be harvested when they mature. Isn’t that topical? I was one of the folks who was aware of the premise going in, and I was quite surprised at how muted and taken for granted it was in the book (although I shouldn’t have been, Ishiguro being the writer he is). Instead of a book filled with fiddly medical bits and soul-searching passages of moral inquiry, we’ve got a book that’s very much like The Remains of the Day. I suppose you could make the argument that Remains contained a great deal of soul-searching and moral inquiry, but that really wasn’t the point, and it was generally done to service something else. So.
The narrator is Kathy H., a “carer” waiting for her turn to “donate” (what lovely euphemisms they use for the doomed souls who are aiding in their own systematic slaughter), and she is remembering, as best she can, the story of her life, specifically as it relates to her two best friends (Tommy and Ruth). Like Remains, this book lives and breathes memory, but Kathy is not so unreliable as Mr. Stevens, despite the fact that she frequently calls her memory into question herself. She is much less verbally sophisticated, however, and had I not read any of his other work I might have been making that statement about Ishiguro himself. Lack of sophistication aside, Kathy has a fully-realized voice. Kathy’s storytelling is sloppy, as is the structuring of her own memories, and no matter how old she might actually be, the reader is always left with the impression that we are listening to a child. I think this is ultimately the source of the novel’s pathos; if she was ever to achieve adulthood in the reader’s eyes we would condemn her choice to stay and live out her days as stupid, and she would not be worthy of our sympathy. As it stands, we are left with a deep melancholy, and the thought that, since she knows so little of the world beyond the donations, that she has helped her two best friends die with some sort of peace, there is nothing left for her except the comfort of a destiny fulfilled.
Major issues aside, there are a number of interesting things going on in this book. Kathy and her friends have a frankness about sex and relationships that is both refreshing and disturbing, and I think it comes with the prolonged childhood the “students” enjoy. There is much talk of love, particularly from Ruth, but the word doesn’t mean to them what it means to us (one of the “guardians” brings this up towards the end, and Kathy never does seem to understand), and there is always the sense that love isn’t about your strongest feelings of intimacy, but about who you want to have sex with exclusively. Kathy and the others have heard of the intimacy and complications of sex in the outside world, but they associate it with procreation (they can’t have children) rather than emotional intimacy. Their major emotional dilemmas aren’t linked to human connections, but like children, to the bits of the self that they release for public consumption. It’s tempting to make this disparity purely about the way they were raised, very sheltered, with no real notion of how cruel people and the world can really be, but I think that’s over-simplifying. One of the older characters, “Madam” as they call her, collects the students’ artwork in the attempt to prove they have souls, and it’s never quite clear if they actually do. On the one hand we are inside Kathy’s head, and we understand that she lives and breathes and feels and cares about things deeply, but on the other hand her cares are blindingly trivial for much of her life, her acceptance of her friends dying is intensely alien, and though we might take it as a kind of stoicism brought on by her upbringing, it’s more likely that she simply isn’t able to make that quantum leap to adulthood where she understands what the death of a person actually means. Do the clones have souls? Ishiguro isn’t telling.
I might also add, as an aside, that I am in love with the cover of this book, which is far more impressive in person. The boat image is superb, and though it comes rather near the end of the novel, it is one of the most important symbols in the book.
Next is Vincent Lam’s Bloodlettings and Miraculous Cures.
