Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, part deux

This was the post that made me buy the book immediately. The good thing about the post is that there are no spoilers – none at all. And good discussion in the comments section (all of which I avoided first time I read it – because I feared there would be spoilers).

I am mostly struck (at this moment – I’m still processing the book) by Kath’s voice in Never Let Me Go. The narrator’s voice. The chatty, detailed, almost mundane voice – it reminded me a bit of the voice in Prep (which is one of the most distinctive and compelling first-person voices I’ve heard in a long time – I wouldn’t say the writing itself was great, but the voice!! And the story! Could not put the book down. Yo) Anyway, Kath’s voice reminded me a bit of the voice in Prep – except there’s this overlay of portentousness and doom in Never Let Me Go. Like: for all intents and purposes (or: “for all intensive purposes”) – it’s just your regular old kids-at-boarding-school novel. It’s a novel of adolescent angst, a three-dimensional portrait of school, life, romance, teen sex, classes, authority figures, etc. But you still get this creepy sense of how much you don’t know … and you know that when you find out, it’s going to be horrible … but we are never “in” on the secret before Kath is … We just have to listen to her babble on about her teenage romances and her love triangles, and I kept just getting a kind of gruesome feeling in the pit of my stomach, as I read on. Like: who are they? What are they? Are they old? Deformed? What is it?? It was awful. The narrator’s voice (like I said before) is totally convincing – although I have to think about it a bit more.

There’s one essential part of the book that didn’t quiiiiite ring true for me – but it was alllllmost there.

Sort of spoilers below … I hint at things that should not be hinted at, if you plan on reading the book.

Only those who have read it follow me!!


So … there was a false note, for me, in the whole bit about the artwork taken from the kids – and what the students all believe happened to it. How rumors fly, and what they all settle on as the logical explanation.

I need to be careful here, because I’m treading into real Spoiler Land. I feel like the explanation they came up with (the students I mean) … I guess, if it wasn’t so fairy tale-ish, so: “They need our artwork because of THIS!” – I guess I just didn’t believe that the STUDENTS would believe that fairy tale explanation. I realize they were sheltered, and in many ways naive – but … I guess I felt like it was too “and they lived happily ever after”…. It did add to the ominous feeling of that part of the book, because you KNEW something bad was coming … But I still think it might have been more powerful if I, the reader, hadn’t been so skeptical. If I, too, had thought; “Maybe that IS why they took the artwork!!”

But I didn’t believe it for a second. Perhaps this just tells you that I’m a cynical person who’s gotten my heart broke one too many times to believe in that crap anymore. This is highly possible.

I do think Ishiguro is smarter than that, though – and was going for an unbalancing effect, a sort of dreamlike: “what is real, what isn’t real” feeling … and that one thing pulled me out of it. Only momentarily, though. It was like a semi-bad actor showing up in a movie with great actors. You have to just forgive it, and go, “Okay, so I didn’t quite believe that … but oh well … here comes the next moment! Moving on!”

And when the real explanation comes … and what the artwork really was for … and how it was kind of close to their imagining about it … it was quite chilling. Horrible, really. Makes me want to puke. To be honest, the whole book makes me want to puke.

Am I insane to say that I think it could have made me want to puke more?

I have to think more on it (obviously) … but I just want to say that I had the same response as Stefanie above, this morning. I read the last 10 pages, and I truly believe if my bed had spontaneously combusted I would have been hesitant to leave the book behind – I was that engrossed, that sucked in – awful, it had an awful inevitability to it, once you truly understood what was going on … and because of that inevitability (which can take on almost Greek proportions) – there was a coldness to my response to the final 10 pages. Like, the veil was lifted, all was clear … no escape … one must trudge with the characters to their fates … but, like Stefanie, at the last paragraph, I found myself welling up with tears.

And the ending of the book has stayed with me all day.

It reminds me of that one sentence in the last section of Remains of the Day. Anyone who has read the book will know the moment I mean. Something like, “To be truthful, my heart was breaking.” No more, no less. No description, nothing but that … and since the rest of the book was this elegant precise prose … My God, to suddenly be punched forward into this man’s heart like that … It hit me like a ton of bricks.

The ending of Never Let Me Go, even with its inevitability, hit me in the same way. Ka-pow.

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