A
Conversation with
about his book Never let me go
KAZUO ISHIGURO
Q: What was your starting point for Never Let Me Go?
A: Over the last fifteen years I kept writing pieces of a story about
an odd
group of “students” in the English countryside. I was never sure who
these
people were. I just knew they lived in wrecked farmhouses, and though
they did
a few typically student-like things—argued over books, worked on the
occasional
essay, fell in and out of love—there was no college campus or teacher
anywhere
in sight. I knew too that some strange fate hung over these young
people, but I
didn’t know what. In my study at home, I have a lot of these short
pieces, some
going back as far as the early ‘90s. I’d wanted to write a novel about
my
students, but I’d never got any further; I’d always ended up writing
some other
quite different novel. Then around four years ago I heard a discussion
on the
radio about advances in biotechnology. I usually tune out when
scientific
discussions come on, but this time I listened, and the framework around
these
students of mine finally fell in place. I could see a way of writing a
story
that was simple, but very fundamental, about the sadness of the human
condition.
Q: This novel is set in a recognizable England of the late 20th
century. Yet
it contains a key dystopian, almost sci-fi dimension you’d normally
expect to
find in stories set in the future (such as Brave New World).
Were you at
any point tempted to set it in the future?
A: I was never tempted to set this story in the future. That’s partly a
personal thing. I’m not very turned on by futuristic landscapes.
Besides, I
don’t have the energy to think about what cars or shops or cup-holders
would
look like in a future civilization. And I didn’t want to write anything
that
could be mistaken for a “prophecy.” I wanted rather to write a story in
which
every reader might find an echo of his or her own life.
In any case, I’d always seen the novel taking place in the England of
the ‘70s
and ‘80s–the England of my youth, I suppose. It’s an England far
removed from
the butlers-and-Rolls Royce England of, say, The Remains of the
Day. I
pictured England on an overcast day, flat bare fields, weak sunshine,
drab
streets, abandoned farms, empty roads. Apart from Kathy’s childhood
memories,
around which there could be a little sun and vibrancy, I wanted to
paint an
England with the kind of stark, chilly beauty I associate with certain
remote
rural areas and half-forgotten seaside towns.
Yes, you could say there’s a “dystopian” or “sci-fi” dimension. But I
think of
it more as an “alternative history” conceit. It’s more in the line
of “What if
Hitler had won?” or “What if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated?” The
novel
offers a version of Britain that might have existed by the late
twentieth
century if just one or two things had gone differently on the
scientific front.
Q: Kathy, the narrator of this book, isn’t nearly as buttoned-up as
some of
your previous narrators (such as those of The Remains of the Day
or When
We Were Orphans) and seems more reliable to the reader. Was this a
deliberate departure on your part?
A: One of the dangers you have to guard against as a novelist is
repeating
things you’re deemed to have done well in the past, just for the
security of
repeating them. I’ve been praised in the past for my unreliable,
self-deceiving, emotionally restrained narrators. You could almost say
at one
stage that was seen as my trademark. But I have to be careful not to
confuse my
narrators with my own identity as a writer. It’s so easy, in all walks
of life,
to get trapped into a corner by things that once earned you praise and
esteem.
That’s not to say I won’t one day reprieve my buttoned-up unreliable
narrators
if that’s what my writing requires. You see, in the past, my narrators
were
unreliable, not because they were lunatics, but because they were
ordinarily
self-deceiving. When they looked back over their failed lives, they
found it
hard to see things in an entirely straight way. Self-deception of that
sort is
common to most of us, and I really wanted to explore this theme in my
earlier
books. But Never Let Me Go isn’t concerned with that kind of
self-deception. So I needed my narrator to be different. An unreliable
narrator
here would just have got in the way.
Q: Was it a different experience writing from the female
perspective, and
also writing in a modern-day vernacular rather than the more formal
language of
past eras?
A: I didn’t worry much about using a female narrator. My first
published novel,
A Pale View of Hills, was narrated by a woman too. When I was a
young
writer, I used narrators who were elderly, who lived in cultures very
different
from my own. There’s so much imaginative leaping you have to do to
inhabit a
fictional character anyway, the sex of the character becomes just one
of so
many things you have to think about–and it’s probably not even one of
the more
demanding challenges.
As for the more vernacular style, well, she’s someone narrating in
contemporary
England, so I had to have her talk appropriately. These are technical
things,
like actors doing accents. The challenge isn’t so much achieving a
voice that’s
more vernacular, or more formal, it’s getting one that properly
presents that
narrator’s character. It’s finding a voice that allows a reader to
respond to a
character not just through what he or she does in the story, but also
through
how he/she speaks and thinks.
Q: This novel, like most of your others, is told through the filter
of
memory. Why is memory such a recurring theme in your work?
A: I’ve always liked the texture of memory. I like it that a scene
pulled from
the narrator’s memory is blurred at the edges, layered with all sorts of
emotions, and open to manipulation. You’re not just telling the reader:
“this-and-this happened.” You’re also raising questions like: why has
she
remembered this event just at this point? How does she feel about it?
And when
she says she can’t remember very precisely what happened, but she’ll
tell us
anyway, well, how much do we trust her? And so on. I love all these
subtle
things you can do when you tell a story through someone’s memories.
But I should say I think the role played by memory in Never Let Me
Go is
rather different to what you find in some of my earlier books. In, say,
The
Remains of the Day, memory was something to be searched through
very warily
for those crucial wrong turns, for those sources of regret and remorse.
But in
this book, Kathy’s memories are more benevolent. They’re principally a
source
of consolation. As her time runs out, as her world empties one by one
of the
things she holds dear, what she clings to are her memories of them.
Q: The setting for the first section of this book is a boarding
school and
you capture well the peer pressure and self-consciousness of being a
kid at
such a place. Did you draw on your own past for this? Did you have
other direct
sources, such as your daughter?
A: I never went to boarding school, and my daughter doesn’t go to one
now! But
of course I drew on my own memories of what it felt like to be a child
and an
adolescent. And though I don’t study my daughter and her friends,
notebook in
hand, I suppose it’s inevitable the experience of being a parent would
inform
the way I portray children.
Having said that, I can’t think of any one scene in that “school”
section
that’s based, even partly, on an actual event that ever happened to me
or
anyone I know. When I write about young people, I do much the same as
when I
write about elderly people, or any other character who’s very different
from me
in culture and experience. I try my best to think and feel as they
would, then
see where that takes me. I don’t find that children present any special
demands
for me as a novelist. They’re just characters, like everyone else.
The school setting, I must add, is appealing because in a way it’s a
clear
physical manifestation of the way all children are separated off from
the adult
world, and are drip-fed little pieces of information about the world
that
awaits them, often with generous doses of deception, kindly meant or
otherwise.
In other words, it serves as a very good metaphor for childhood in
general.
Q: You’ve sometimes written screenplays, including the one for the
upcoming
Merchant Ivory movie The White Countess. And you’ve had the
experience
of seeing your novel The Remains of the Day made into a well-
known
movie. What for you is the relationship between cinema and the novel?
Is it
fruitful or dangerous for a writer to work in both?
A: I find writing for cinema and writing novels very different. That’s
partly
because writing novels is my vocation, my full-time job, while I’m a
kind of
enthusiastic amateur when it comes to screenplays. A key difference is
that in
cinema the story is told principally through images and music–the words
are a
kind of supplement. In a novel, words are all you have. But the two
forms have
many things in common, of course, and I think you can learn much about
one from
the other.
As you say, I wrote the screenplay to The White Countess, and
collaborated on a movie released last year, The Saddest Music In The
World.
One important attraction of screenwriting for me is that it’s part of a
larger
collaborative process. There’s something unhealthy about continually
writing
novels all your life. A novelist doesn’t collaborate the way musicians
or theatre
people do, and after a while the lack of fresh influences can be
dangerous. For
me, working on a film, with a director, with actors, maybe other
writers, is a
good way to keep outside influences coming in.
I’m often asked if I worry that writing screenplays will make my novels
more
like screenplays. But I’ve found the exact opposite. Looking back, my
first
novel, A Pale View of Hills, looks to me very close to a
screenplay in
technique. It moves forward scene by scene with pared-down dialogue,
little set
descriptions and stage directions. But just after I finished that
novel, I
wrote two screenplays for British TV’s Channel 4, and that made me
acutely
conscious of the differences between film writing and novel writing. I
became
dissatisfied with the idea that I might write a novel that could just
as well
have been a film. My feeling at the time was that novels wouldn’t
survive as a
form–wouldn’t be able to compete with TV and cinema–unless they focused
on
doing things only novels could do. Ever since then, I’ve tried to write
books
that offer an experience completely different from the sort you might
get in
front of a cinema or TV screen. You could say I want to write unfilmable
novels–though I’ve been keen enough to discuss movie adaptations once I
finish
a book! But while I’m writing, I want my novel to work uniquely as a
novel, and
my screenplay to work uniquely as a film.
Hardcover
edtition.“Never Let
Me Go“,Vintage <http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/catalog/display.pperl?
isbn=9781400078776&view=qa>
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