This is a long, leisurely
book, with a single narrator who does not have the benefit of a university
education and who sustains a straightforward simplicity of expression throughout.
Kathy is sometimes distracted by her own line of thinking and recalls herself
to subject matter from which she has digressed with an Anyway or an As I was saying.
It’s beautifully done. Ishiguro creates a mystery which is only slowly revealed, information
dripped into the narrative bit by bit.
The plot could be
labelled as sci-fi or dystopian fantasy, but it hews so close to ordinary
reality that it is really an extended metaphor for life’s journey. True, it is
distinctive that Ishiguro’s characters have no natural parents - they are
cloned human beings – and their lives are organised by an invisible state
apparatus which provides them with guardians and an education and a career path
about which there seems to be no choice: they are to become organ donors, and
they will begin to donate while still young and will expect to die (though they
use the word complete) no later than
their fourth donation. When they complete, all their remaining organs will be
harvested for use – a fact which Ishiguro slips in at page 274 of his 282 page
book.
So we are born, we live
our lives and we die. The distinctive feature of the lives of the clones is
that, having no parents, and discharged from guardianship at sixteen, they are
used to looking after each other. Indeed, eventually they all become carers to donors before becoming donors themselves. Their lives are very
closely intertwined, and so Ishiguro can write a delicate story of intimate
relationships, their ups and downs, their moments of frustration and of
greatness, their breakdowns .
It seems there is no
way of altering your destiny, and when Ishiguro introduces the possibility that
there might be in Chapter Nineteen(pages 214 – 232) it is at the same time the first
moment of emotional release in the book, a Greater
Love … moment when one of the three principal characters, Ruth, holds out a
chance to Kathy and Tommy which is also life-sacrificing on her part. She holds
out to them a possible route for delaying the moment at which they will become
donors. If they are true lovers, they may be able to get a deferral.
But Charon does not
allow deferrals now anymore than he allowed one to David Hume; the rumour of their existence is a myth and Chapter Twenty Two
is devoted to revealing that (pp 251 – 270), opening the way for a closing Chapter
Twenty Three (pp 271 – 282) where Tommy and then Kathy reconcile themselves to
the inevitable. Here once again, Ishiguro is writing to release the store of emotion he
has built up inside us and, at least for this reader, succeeds.
