With his newest novel, the Remains of the
Day author
has crafted a bizarre, tragic fiction on the perils of cloning. But its
critics
are missing Ishiguro's darker implications about our conformist
society.
Although the premise on which Kazuo Ishiguro's
sixth novel
hinges is not fully revealed until a quarter of the way into it,
knowing that
the central characters are clones created for organ donation is not a
spoiler
to the story of one Kathy H., a clone and "carer" — a sort of Hospice
worker who ministers to fellow clones who have already undergone
donation
procedures. Never Let Me Go is only ostensibly about cloning, and
Ishiguro would probably shudder at ghettoizing it in the science
fiction genre.
Rather, the book plays chilling, new-fangled variations on themes
intrinsic to
Ishiguro's previous work: interrelated dynamics of self-sacrifice and
thwarted
love, and gaining awareness of fulfilling an appointed role within a
structure
that will inevitably bring about one's demise. From this mix of
genetics and
dreams deferred, Ishiguro conjures one of the most bizarre, tragic
paradoxes in
recent fiction, rendered all the more startling through subtlety and
implication.
The book will be used by shortsighted elitists to
reinforce
the opinion that Ishiguro is the foremost bearer of the British novel's
mantle
(even more so than the current post-9/11 cr�me-de-la-cr�me, Ian McEwan) because Ishiguro's universe — in which
characters dutifully execute socially required obligations and, instead
of
rebelling, bear the repercussions — is essentially British. Such
pigeonholing remains
unshakably tied to Stevens, the dutiful butler of the Nazi sympathizer
in the
pitch-perfect, Booker Award-winning The Remains of the Day and
its film
version, and could possibly put off more readers on this side of the
pond than
it encourages. But his books thus far are hardly darkly subversive
updates or
insightful twists on the novel of manners, such as McEwan's
Atonement
and the movie Gosford Park. Even The Remains of the Day
may be
read as a critique on reflexive historical whitewashing often committed
when
highlighting family genealogies.
Never Let Me Go firmly
places Ishiguro in the absurdist tradition of Beckett and Kafka's
visionary
irony even more than The Unconsoled managed to do through its
surrealist
comedy and lack of explanation, or his exquisitely oddball screenplay
for The
Saddest Music In the World directed by Guy Maddin (for the record,
their
filmographies could not feel any less British.) Kathy's narration also
opposes
Dickensian detail to the point that passages can feel sinisterly
uninhabited,
as if lacking set pieces, but are never less than riveting because of
the
stylistic sleights of hand gesturing toward psychological aspects wholly
unknown to her.
Her England in "late 1990s," while parallel to
ours, is little more than occasional truck-stop cafes on roads
stretching
"across marshland, or maybe rows of furrowed fields, the sky big and
grey
and never changing mile after mile" between "recovery centres."
She traces the lives of students growing up at Hailsham, a secluded
idyll of a
school in the British countryside, where the nurturing yet mysteriously
distant
"guardians" encourage the students to produce works of art for
reasons revealed later by the book's deus ex machina. The
students' raison
d'�tre is
unveiled in
furtive glimpses as it is to the Hailshamites themselves: Miss Lucy
admits,
"You've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really
understand."
Naturally, all the students grow fixated upon sex
as they
mature:
... when the guardians first started giving us
proper
lectures about sex, they tended to run them together with talk about the
donations... I remember once she brought in a life-size skeleton from
the
biology class to demonstrate how it was done. We watched in
astonishment as she
put the skeleton through various contortions, thrusting her pointer
around
without the slightest self-consciousness. She was going through all the
nuts
and bolts of how you do it, what went in where, the different
variations, like
this was still Geography. Then suddenly, with the skeleton in an
obscene heap
on the desktop, she turned away and began telling us how we had to be
careful who
we had sex with. Not just because of the diseases, but because, she
said,
"sex affects emotions in ways you'd never expect." ... And the reason
it meant so much — so much more than, say, dancing or table-tennis — was
because the people out there were different from us students: they
could have
babies from sex. That was important to them, this question of who did
it with
whom.
Her shock comes not so much from the already
familiar
mechanics but the revelation of an emotional component, as if that
association
is not just Other but actually quaint and old-fashioned. Unconsciously,
the
guardians promote a strict dichotomy of recreational versus procreative
sex
because in their England, Hailsham is the shining example of
fornication's
fate. If successful human cloning has been achieved, then presumably
test-tube
engineering has progressed far enough to ensure early health for all
children
and perhaps even particular items on parents' wish lists. What is "told
and not told" is that these students, whose lives will be foreshortened
to
their mid-30s, after they have been useful carers but still in their
donating
primes, have little reason for cultivating emotionally fulfilling sexual
relationships. They have been bred to be productive in only one
capacity.
This insinuation does not stop Kathy from aiding and
abetting a classic love triangle with her best friends, whom almost all
of the
action surrounds: Ruth, an annoying schemer desperate for validation,
and
Tommy, the peculiarly temperamental boy susceptible to bullying who
does not
create art. Thankfully, we are spared the hair-splitting heartache
expected of
schoolgirl pining. Instead, Kathy meticulously diagrams the many ways
that she
renegotiated her relationships with Ruth and Tommy in order to preserve
the
trio's fragile peace. She does so without a shred of martyrdom and,
unexpectedly, without mention of her true affection for Tommy. It is
her natural
inclination toward safeguarding that also makes her a successful carer
whose
donors "have always tended to do much better than expected. Their
recovery
times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified
as
'agitated,' even before the fourth donation."
Still, she as well as Ruth and Tommy remain eerily
tied to
their younger selves, never mentally wandering too far beyond the
borders of
Hailsham's Arcadian grounds. It is through the adult Kathy's prattling,
ever-exacting narration — girlishly wearisome, banal, surly, overtly
dramatic,
rife with cliffhangers — that one realizes the total effect of this
medical
dystopia: nil awareness of the body and, worse, the very experience of
being
incarnate. An absence of physicality permeates the novel rather than
attention
called to their scientifically unique bodies and purpose. Illness,
eating, and
other actions that connote embodiment, including Kathy's love for
Tommy, are
strangely irrelevant and left out altogether.
For all the talk about it, sex is a non-issue and
offstage,
echoing the students' marginalization, until donations commence. "That
first time, we still had stitches to worry about," Kathy describes. The
reader's stomach-churning reaction at this out-of-place mention of a
character's
body comes more from realizing her pathetic disconnect with the flesh,
which
has become visibly real by fulfilling its function, than imagining the
intimate, unpredictable contact occurring around a surgery wound from
organ
harvesting. Ay, there's the rub, indeed.
This irony has been lost on a number of the book's
reviewers who claim Never Let Me Go meditates weirdly on what
constitutes humanity while starring a passionless character who never
fully
comes to life. That unreal aura, however, is her substance — the
equivalent of
looking at images of Dolly, the sheep who became the first cloned
mammal, and
the first cloned gelding announced by French and Italian scientists
this past
week, Cryozootech (a name that sounds uncannily like a chapter from
Margaret
Atwood's biologically apocalyptic Oryx and Crake). They are
creatures
that appear removed from the natural world and yet simultaneously seem
to
constitute our living, breathing natural world squared. Their physical
doubling
has spawned a doubling of our perspective.
In her sheltered world — suspended between faux
realism and
surrealism, barely impinging on the rest of the living — the sensible,
straightforwardly simple Kathy could not be expected to have any more
or less
self-awareness. Her unreal aura is a projection by others. ("There were
times I'd look down at you all from my study window and I'd feel such
revulsion," says one character in a neo-gothic scene that puts a spin on
going to meet one's god and Maker by way of The Wizard of Oz.)
That projection
extends to critics so swept up in judgment calling that they can no
longer see
when a text has become an indictment. Their critical error is partially
understandable: Most people want to preserve an illusion of freedom by
opposing
the idea of being determined by the human genome and, by extension,
cloning.
Kathy, however, lacks any detectable flaw, which is
more
categorically un-human than any laboratory doppelganger. Her ability to
do what
is best with purpose and poignancy — within the contours of the
Ishigurian
universe, where total liberation is not just impossible but not even an
idea —
makes her fascinatingly unreal: At the end of the day, she is better
than you.
Consequently, the questions that arise about whether the Hailshamites
have
souls are all the more sad.
Kathy imagines you possibly to be another carer; she
understands "how you might be resentful — about my bedsit, my car, above
all, the way I get to pick and choose who I look after." She speculates
that "you'll have heard the same talk" about the "horror movie
stuff" surrounding the climactic fourth donation that precedes
"completion." The reader is rarely addressed, but it is enough to get
across something that reviewers too busy pooh-poohing have missed: You,
too,
are a clone. How else would you have been acquainted with Kathy or her
story in
the first place?
And like Ruth and Chrissie, a "veteran" that
befriends the trio at a commune-halfway-house called the Cottages
between Hailsham
and recovery centres, much of who you are is already cloned "from TV
programmes: the way they gestured to each other, sat together on sofas,
even
the way they argued and stormed out of rooms." What if, unbeknownst to
you, the ways you handle moments of drama that slice open your day are
nothing
more than forgotten I Love Lucy episodes?
It is our responsibility to realize the extent of
control
exercised upon us by forces that are ultimately more enduring than we
are. Part
of mimicry, after all, is a renunciation of self, the giving up of
one's vital
parts to the unknown until nothing remains that may be considered
substantially
one's own. You give your heart away.
Williams, Alan.”Tears of a Clone:Kazu
Ishiguro´s
Never Let Me Go”,The Simon Culture had it coming,April 18, 2005,<http://www.thesimon.com/magazine/article
s/bias/0814_tears_clone_kazuo_ishiguro_never_let_go.html>
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