The Quiet Dystopian Horror of Never Let Me Go

*Big spoilers ahead, so venture forth at your own peril*

There is always something of a journey when reading a novel, as your enjoyment rises and falls, your appreciation for the writing or construction of plot waxes and wanes, and your realization of what the writer is doing sharpens and blurs.  If charted on a graph, my experience reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go would show several turns as my expectations were met and subverted and my understanding of how the novel fit into and broke out of its generic conventions came into focus.

I had never read anything by Ishiguro, but whenever I mentioned that Never Let Me Go was on my reading list I only ever heard good things, little gasps of excitement for me to read the book, so I entered the novel with raised expectations.  It quickly became clear to me with talk of donations and Hailsham that there was a bit of science fiction at the root of the novel, and I was intrigued further.  The writing, while not breathtaking, was strong and compelling.  I liked the tone and the pacing and was excited to learn more about where this was going.  The line on the graph was moving up.  Early on I began to suspect that Kathy and her friends were clones who were created for the sake of providing body parts to other citizens, and this suspicion was confirmed 80 pages or so into the novel.  Great, now the book looked to belong more to dystopian fiction than to the larger genre of science fiction.  At some point in the second part of the book, while the kids were at the Cottages and chasing down Ruth’s possible, it became clear to me that the casual pacing of the first section was going to remain throughout the novel, that Ishiguro was not going to be turning this into a tale of adventure at any point.  At first I was disappointed, pointing that line on the graph down, not because I don’t enjoy introspective literature, but because the tropes and conventions of science fiction and dystopian fiction that I was expecting were not present.  It seemed that the setting was merely a backdrop to tell the story of these three friends.  I did not expect any revelations to come at the end to surprise the reader, to make the reader reconsider what had come before—it was what it was.  I felt us building at some point to a meeting with Madame, but I didn’t know what we could possibly gain from the encounter.

I was of course foolish.  That encounter took a thought and a feeling that had been growing for 200-some pages, brought them into sharp focus, and illuminated them with horror.  Before that, I was aware that we were watching the movements of a friendship under impossible conditions, as all three knew their fate was to eventually donate up to four donations and then die.  How does friendship and human interaction mean anything with certain death sitting on the horizon?  You will be separated from your friends.  You will be isolated in either your work as a carer or your role as a donor.  You will not have meaningful dreams about what life might be like.  Kathy makes for an amazing lens to experience this story, and like hers, our understanding of their future is never really clear.  We know what’s going to happen, but we don’t really know how it will come about, what the system will be, why it will happen and in what way.  Like the kids at Hailsham we are both told and not told, and like the kids in Hailsham, we accept it without fighting back. 

What is so amazing about the encounter with Madame and Miss Emily is that it is our first extended interaction with a non-clone.  The chilliness of their perspective is full of quiet horror.  They wanted to prove that clones were human, that they had souls.  They wanted to prove that you could give clones a quality of life even as they fulfilled their duty.  There is simultaneously a tenderness and a coldness in their attitude.  Never did they challenge the assumption that this swath of humanity had to be sacrificed so that other could get a kidney transplant or a new liver.  They accepted the premise of a clone’s function.  They were merely more humanitarian murderers.  The difference, never stated outright in the book, is like having humanely treated free-range chickens instead of piling them all on top of each other in an industrial chicken farm—only we’re doing that with humans instead of chickens.

You can feel the line on my graph swooping up and up.  Never Let Me Go is unlike any other dystopian novel I’ve read in terms of its focus.  In most dystopian fiction, the author is concerned with the system of oppression, the way the state exerts its power and makes the populace comply, willingly or otherwise.  There are no slogans in Never Let Me Go.  The schooling is not a time of convincing the kids that they make the noblest sacrifice for the good of society.  Similarly, there is no point in which our protagonists buck against the system or call its existence into question.  There is always an acceptance that this is how it is, even as Ruth dreams of working in an office.  There is talk of how instruction worked at Hailsham so that the kids both knew and didn’t know what lay ahead, but as becomes clear from the final conversation with Miss Emily, that was not a deviant plot, but just the way it worked out.  Perhaps the scientists who invented cloning found a way to breed docility into the clones in the same way it bred sterility, but that is never discussed. Ishiguro is not interested in those details, and in some ways to focus on that stuff would actively distract from the story he’s telling, a story about friends with no future.

The clones, or students as they are called at Hailsham, are representative of every class of people that are necessary to the functioning of society but whose contributions are always downplayed or ignored.  Unwelcome immigrants, the working poor who fuel the machine of industry with their life’s blood, the slaves on whose back a country’s prosperity was built—all of these people have been viewed by those who benefit from, nay rely upon, their labor as less than human.   We cannot justify the horrid conditions of their lives if they are human, and the clones are the same way.  No one would sign their own son or daughter up for the life of a clone, a mere vessel to hold organs until they are needed by someone else.  They must be considered sub-human for the system to work.  But we, the readers, only find out about the sub-human status of clones in that final conversation with Miss Emily, because we have been in Kathy’s mind the whole time, and Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are of course entirely human.  One of Ishiguro’s strengths is breaking down the emotion and motives of characters within a scene.  Kathy gets irritated and mad, but she always comes round to seeing things from different perspectives.  Ruth is certainly a bully to Kathy, but Kathy always understands in the end the impulses for Ruth’s bullying and even seeks to protect Ruth.  Kathy’s sympathy and empathy are near superhuman, not sub-human.  The novel makes a big deal about what is said and not said, made explicit or left implicit, and Kathy is an observer of signs and meaning.  It is the very trait that undoubtedly makes her a good carer.  And it is this very trait that makes the novel a bittersweet tale.  The only explosions of anger come from Tommy, and Kathy hypothesizes that perhaps he had those tantrums because he knew the truth in a way that everyone else didn’t.  In that hypothesis, Kathy and Ishiguro point out that the reasonable response to this system is one of violence and outrage, but that is not a response we ever see.  There is only acceptance.  As a reader, I found myself understanding that acceptance and contemplating . . .  well, contemplating everything I have written here.

How did you accept that acceptance?  I feel like Ishiguro wanted to put his reader into a contemplative mindset, to think about these things without anger and outrage.  There is not call to burn down a broken system.  There is a push to consider the humanity of those at the bottom of the social power structure.  Because of course, the world of Never Let Me Go is a world of fiction, but it is also an analogue for our world.

In the end I have incredible respect for what Ishiguro has created here, and I find there is a lot to chew on, which is how I like my novels.  And it is, I believe, a brave and risky novel.  Watching kids grow up who are destined to die is in the end every bit as dark as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I think is a good novel of comparison, but I will not elaborate further here.   

Never Let Me Go is the final book on my list of 100, and it is a great way to sign off the project.

The Yeahs and Mehs of Atonement

*Spoilers lie ahead like the wounded and the dead on Robbie’s road to Dunkirk.*

If there’s one thing I’ll take away from reading 100 English-language fiction novels in a row it’s that literary tastes vary as widely as there are readers in this world.  Books that have made me dizzy with their language and story have been reviewed by others with scorn and distaste.  Novels that have been merely ho-hum to me have 3 pages of splash quotes behind their cover and a trail of 5-star reviews on Goodreads in which reviewers gasp for breath to express how gorgeous they think the writing is.  We all engage in fiction in different ways, demand different things from the stories we read, and delight in different literary conventions.  We all use the words character, plot, narrative, poetry, movement, realism, and the like, but what is a fully-developed character to me, is a cardboard cutout to you, and vice versa.  And our feelings about any given novel, as they are with all art forms, are so strong that someone else’s emotional reaction makes no sense to us.  How can they like this?!  How can they not like that?!

Atonement is the first novel by Ian McEwan that I have read, and according to the pages of excerpted quotes of “international acclaim” that opens my edition it is the finest of his novels, a masterpiece written by a top novelist at the top of his game.  When I hit the half-way point, which is where Part I comes to a close, I read the pages of praise and turned to Ann, my wife, and said “the second half of this book must be amazing, because the first half was . . . fine.”  I endured Part II, mostly enjoyed Part III, and liked the epilogue.  McEwan is obviously an accomplished writer, and I found his prose perfectly  competent.  I didn’t read anything that sent me running to my computer to share passages with friends, nothing that made me ache or shudder.  To those who found that aching-shuddering-deliciousness in McEwan’s prose, I am so glad you found something you love.

The characters were excellent, and I liked the division of the novel into its parts.  I liked the formal structuring of the first half of the novel, the pre-war piece that covers the events of a single day.  I liked that that formal structure took a hit with the coming of war as chapter numbers fell away.  I was accepting of the love story of Cecilia and Robbie, though their mad 15-minute love affair seemed a little ludicrous to me, a way to put in a large movement in the plot while maintaining Aristotle’s Unities.  That that brief love-affair would survive four years of prison and a year of war seemed even more ludicrous to me, but I was willing to accept it for the sake of the story.  Of course, one of the major themes of the novel is the mysterious boundary between reality and fiction and the godlike creative powers of the storyteller, so it is perfectly in keeping with that theme to create star-crossed lovers who have no time to even know who they love but all the time to keep loving them.

In the end, it is this theme that lies beneath the story that I found truly engaging, once that theme became clear in the last 40 pages of the novel.  The notion of authorial invention is of course made plain in the opening section through Briony’s character and through the unintentional lie that shapes everyone’s future, but it seemed to have been put aside for the entirety of the second section in which Robbie trudges the 20 miles through French countryside to Dunkirk.  In my reading, this was the section that I found difficult to move through, not because the subject matter was difficult or because the writing was weak, but because there was no clear purpose for being there.  Events happen, but nothing that feels particularly significant.  The men are allowed shelter and food for a night.  Every last trace of a woman and her son are removed from the earth by a bomb.  An RAF man is nearly killed by an unhappy mob.  A pig is saved.  Things happen but nothing seems particularly important or meaningful.  Coming back to that section after finishing the novel, I now see that McEwan was exploring another aspect of his theme here.  The narrative structure of import in this second section is found in the letters between the lovers and in Robbie’s inability to narratively control the war around him.  The lovers are careful to construct their daily reality for each other and for themselves in order to create a world in which the two of them can live together when they meet again.  Robbie’s fevered dreams are likewise a type of storytelling in which Robbie seeks forgiveness from those who have not survived the war’s brutality.  Throughout the novel, we see that stories are first born from reality, but then they supplant reality with their own truths.  And as Briony reflects in the final chapter, in time, when all the participants have died, it is only the story’s voice that will remain and only its truth that will live on.  That’s a fantastic theme to explore in a novel, and I really enjoyed the way that McEwan brought it into focus in the final 40 pages of Atonement.

So the writing was solid, but not especially inspiring to me; the love story was ludicrous and thin, but there if you really wanted a love story; and the final focus of the novel was interesting and thought-provoking.  I didn’t find anything particularly interesting in the form or presentation of the story, but nor were there any prominent faults.  Obviously others have fallen in love with this book, but having spent some time with it, I am happy to shake hands and move on and meet other literary loves.

Objections to The Corrections

I really did not like Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.   It reads easily enough, and Franzen has competent, easy-moving sentences, but while there are no road-blocks to pleasure here, there is very little to get excited about either.  I found nothing particularly engaging about the characters, the plot, the relationships, the humor, or Franzen’s insights into human nature or the modern condition.  This is my first Franzen novel, and I’ll be surprised if it’s not my last.  My enjoyment of the book certainly suffered from my having just read Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.  While reading Atwood, I was struck by passage after passage of poetry, both in phrasing and insight.  Compared to Atwood’s gifts, Franzen’s skills are sophomoric at best.

For the most part, reading The Corrections reminded me of reading a Grisham novel: painless but dull.  I found Franzen’s stabs at cleverness to be writerly and meaningless.  For example: “She’d always been a pretty woman, but to Chip she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.”  That’s the kind of sentence that looks appealing on the surface but which is neither revealing nor plausible.  It is a sentence devoid of any real meaning.  Franzen’s similes fare no better than these empty phrases.  Similes can either be a tool of power and clarity or they can be cute.  Only a handful of the former find their way into this novel.  Most are like this example, which I found at random flipping through the book:  “The doormen in this neighborhood hosed the sidewalk twice a day, and sanitation trucks with brushes like the mustaches of city cops scoured the streets three times a week, but in New York City you never had to go far to find filth and rage.”  The simile of “brushes like the mustaches of city cops” does nothing to give tooth or meaning to the sanitation trucks and what they represent.  It’s an empty rhetorical device that is used competently but in a way that adds nothing to the story.

Family, self-deception, intellectual theorizing vs. reality, the loss of the Midwestern innocence, the use of pharmaceuticals and therapy to compensate for the emptiness of our modern existences—these are all interesting thematic concerns and worthy of exploration though cutting fiction.  This is not that cutting fiction.  It grapples these subjects like a limp-grip handshake of someone who’s not all that interested in or comfortable with the meeting. 

My dislike of The Corrections has nearly everything to do with taste of literary preferences.  Writerly sentences and empty similes are hardly a reason to dismiss a book; I give these examples as indicators of the novel’s general literary approach.  Someone else might find this style rewarding, but it does nothing for me.  This is one of the few novels whose presence on the Time’s 100 list is a complete mystery to me.  Nearly everything else has been either amazing, culturally important, historically important, or stylistically important.  The Corrections is none of those things. 

The Brilliance of The Blind Assassin

*Be warned: Spoilers, spoilers, and more spoilers lay ahead, so don’t read on if you haven’t read the book—and you should read the book, because it is awesome: beautifully written with a striking narrator who unravels a compelling tale.  Go read it and then return, read what I have to say, and then tell me all about your own thoughts.*

*Second warning: this book deserves a much more elegantly written and rigorously considered review than what follows.  It is the week after the 2016 election that I write this and my mental acuity is not at its height.*

This is the first book by Margaret Atwood that I have read, and now I’m wondering why I’ve been wasting years as a literate adult not reading more by her.  The Blind Assassin was one of those books that I knew I was going to love from the first page.  Her writing is a wonderful combination of directness and poetry, intellect and insight without any pomposity.  Her language is beautiful even when her subject isn’t.  Her narrator that is rich and unique.  Iris Chase Griffen is an ornery and sharp-witted woman who is struggling against her physical body’s betrayal and against the nasty turns of fate that time has thrown at her.  She is likeable and humorous and cruel and pitiable.  Atwood’s other characters are all so beautifully drawn that the world of The Blind Assassin pulses with life, even as the narrator’s own pulse slows.

Structure and story in this novel are every bit as brilliant as character and writing.   Atwood weaves a narrative through a variety of literary forms in this book.  Through memoir, fiction, news reports, letters, and more, the strands of Iris’s and Laura’s lives come together and separate and return again so beautifully that I found myself wanting to linger in its pages and remember it in the same way that you sometimes stop to try to commit to memory the details of a particularly striking sunset.  I loved the alternating of “fact” and “fiction”—I use the quotes because of course the “memoir” is itself fiction and the fictional novel within the novel is really biographical for the fictitious author—to connect the past and present and to reveal to the reader the truths buried under the rubble of lies.

This is, above all else, a story about women.  First it’s a story about Laura and Iris, and even when the narrative seems to be more about Iris, Laura is always present.  As Iris writes at the end, “Laura was my left hand, and I was hers.  We wrote the book together.  It’s a left-handed book.  That’s why one of us is always out of sight, whichever way you look at it.”  It’s also a story about Iris and her descendants, namely Sabrina, her granddaughter to whom she finally decides she is writing.  Having lost her daughter, Iris wants to be able to tell Sabrina who she is by laying out the entirety of their past.  Iris imagines that Sabrina is standoffish and brash and dresses in black, a rebel in the way teenage girls can be.  Sabrina has been traveling the world, presumably a lived metaphor for trying to find herself, and Iris, through this book, wants to tell Sabrina who she is.  But the past can be a prison, and Iris wants any sense of identity gained from it to be freeing to Sabrina.  That is the gift that Alex Thomas brings to the narrative: “Your real grandfather was Alex Thomas, and as to who his own father was, well, the sky’s the limit. . . . Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation.  You’re free to reinvent yourself at will.”  Iris wants the information she gives to be simultaneously defining and non-confining.

There are only four men of any consequence in the novel, and one of them is Myra’s husband who does little more than drive Iris about town, mend her broken home, and occasionally keep her company.  The other three, while exerting great influence at particular parts of the narrative, all fail to keep their power for the entirety of the novel.  Alex Thomas comes closest to having a lasting influence, being the man that both sisters loved.  I found Alex to be a fascinating character insofar as he was something of an ass as characterized in the novel within the novel.  He treated the female heroine rather crappily, dismissing her, laughing at her, talking down to her, chiding her, and deriding her.  He is no romantic hero, and no one reading the novel will walk away with an idolized image of him as a lover or a companion.  But Atwood handles his portrayal so deftly that we never criticize (at least not for long) the heroine for being with him.  She is using him as much as he is using her, and while there is genuine affection between them, no one suffers from the delusion that this is a story of true love.  He is powerful and powerless at the same time, mean but desperate, manly and childish.  And as our understanding of who the heroine is changes—as we move from seeing Laura as the unnamed woman to seeing Iris instead—the very nature of the man and the woman’s relationship alters before our eyes.  The whole relationship is masterfully crafted and a marvel to read.

I will point to one other thing that I love: the way Atwood juggles genres and narrative conventions in The Blind Assassin.  We obviously have the science fiction tale of the Zycronians that the man tells the woman, and then there is the romance novel within which that tale of science fiction is told.  Then, within the larger narrative of the novel, we learn of Iris’s and Laura’s childhood, which follows the conventions of the gothic romance novel.  The girls are locked away in the old manor, kept apart from the rabble, their father disappearing regularly into the upper tower for seclusion.  There are secrets behind the doors sealed off to the young girls, and they lose their mother early in life.  Then Iris marries a mysterious and controlling man with wicked plans and a domineering sister.  The entire sequence of their honeymoon, as she is treated like a child, kept in the dark about her father’s state, and controlled by her husband and sister-in-law, was heartbreaking and as tragic-feeling as anything in Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights.  Atwood takes these conventions and places them in a modern context to load them full of additional meaning.  By leaning on those conventions, she presents Richard is the real-life version of Rochester, a domineering man who cannot brook opposition.  Instead of a mad-woman in an attic, he stalks Laura and then declares both Laura and Iris mad to hide his actions from public.  The brilliant stroke here is that this tale is told from the viewpoint of our heroine as a cantankerous old woman who sees the villain for what he really is, a pathetic, vain, predator.  We get our tragedy and a sense of perspective too.  In a lot of ways, it is jarring to move from the 1930s and 1940s to 1998.  She could easily have created a simple frame for the novel, beginning and ending in 1998 and throwing us into the past for the whole of the middle, but instead we are in a constant state of submersion and surfacing.  Atwood uses that jolt to keep the past in perspective. 

I really enjoyed this book, and I’m in awe of the way Atwood handles her characters, her storylines, and her language.

I will leave you with a few questions.

What is the significance of Iris’s fascination with the scrawling on the bathroom walls?  Is it the anonymity of authorship?  The way that voices are layered upon each other making comment upon comment, cultural reference upon cultural reference? 

What is the significance of the prominence of the Red Scare in the story?  A lot of the backdrop is the world of factories and labor and work, not to mention war, all traditionally masculine settings.  Is this to keep the girls out or a commentary on male spaces?  Is it important how the women fare in these traditionally male spaces in the novel?

There are a lot of suicides in the novel—why?  Similarly, infidelity seems to be a recurring plot point.  Is that relevant?

How is the relationship between Richard and Winifred a foil for the relationship between Laura and Iris?

What do you make of the recurring references to “another dimension”?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and analyses!