But perhaps our own lives are mere parodies of real freedom, of real existence? Life is a death sentence, whether you die at twenty or at eighty. ![]() ![]() The children of Hailsham endure short, determined, and thus “pointless” lives but are our lives-though generally longer-less pointless or less determined? The lives of the cloned children, who fall in love and read novels and bicker at school just as ordinary kids do, seem like parodies of real freedom, of real existence, because we know what will happen to them not long after they leave school. It enacts a meek acceptance that finally may be our own, too. Ishiguro’s pithless, neutered prose is mimetically effective. The resignation of these children, who become aware of their fabricated function, is horrifying most of the time, they seem sapped of rebellion. Once they have completed their donations, they will die. We gradually learn that the fictional children we encounter, who attend an English boarding school called Hailsham, are clones, created by the state in order to be killed: their function is to provide healthy organs for normal British citizens. Of course, the stakes are eventually revealed to be fantastically large, and “Never Let Me Go” achieves great and moving speculative power, not because of what it has to say about the dilemma of cloning but because of what it has to say about ordinary life’s unwelcome resemblance to the dilemma of cloning. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for eleven years.” The stakes of the characters’ interactions with one another seemed fantastically small a friend and I had a running joke in which we imagined Ishiguro murmuring with satisfaction to himself, after a morning of hard work, “Say what you want, but I own the scene where Kathy loses her pencil.” It began with dizzying dullness: “My name is Kathy H. His previous novel, “Never Let Me Go” (2005), contained passages that appeared to have been entered in a competition called The Ten Most Boring Fictional Scenes. He avoids ornament or surplus, and seems to welcome cliché, platitude, episodes as bland as milk, an atmosphere of oddly vacated calm whose mild persistence comes to seem teasingly or menacingly unreal. ![]() Kazuo Ishiguro writes a prose of provoking equilibrium-sea-level flat, with unseen fathoms below. Ishiguro has set out to write a novel about people without memory.
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