Monday, May 30, 2016

Never let me go

If you've ever struggled through Remains of the day and wondered what the fuss was all about, maybe you should give Never let me go a birl. For me, it stands as a humanist monument; like the best of science fiction, it is about us in a way that sometimes novels about us cannot achieve. I say science fiction but the dystopia it draws is no more than a setting for a coming of age novel that runs a little deeper than the young adult fiction I think Ishiguro wished to pastiche.

The blunt style hides a sureness of touch and adherence to tone that are masterful. The narrator's matter-of-fact delivery makes utterly credible the fragile yet tender romance that you feel could be blown away by the least breeze, yet is the most powerful story we can make out of our blighted, doomed lives.

Ultimately, it is a tale of a culture so inexorable that it cannot be escaped, that we are left with what we can build from the scraps we are left by people who think we are worth nothing. It is like a rolling tide that sweeps away even hope to leave us broken, clinging to scraps of memory, all of us with pieces pulled from us until there is not enough left to keep living, which in a typically deft piece of irony, the characters call "completing".