Spare Parts

So I’ve just finished Never Let Me Go, a science fiction novel from Kazuo Ishiguro, the British author of Remains of the Day, etc.

A heavy-duty literary author attempting a theme common in genre fiction deserves, I thought, a browse.  After all, Time thought this was the best novel of 2005.

I’m not going to make the usual complaint that Ishiguro has “reinvented the wheel” by using a rather hackneyed science fiction trope under the impression that he was the first to think of it, primarily because I doubt that Ishiguro thinks he’s invented anything particularly new, second because he deploys the SF elements in ways that would be unlikely in genre.

It’s worth looking at what he does, because the  difference in the way Ishiguro uses a science fiction trope, and the way SF writers handle it, is the difference between getting the Man Booker Prize and getting paperbacks with lurid covers.

We open with Kathy, the narrator, recalling her childhood at an elite boarding school called Hailsham, but it’s clear early on that this isn’t a standard boarding school— for one thing, Eton doesn’t call its teachers “guardians.”  Any seasoned SF reader will figure out early on that Hailsham’s students aren’t the children of privilege, but are doomed to be cut up for spare parts— “donations”— until they reach “completion,” which you and I might refer to as “death.”  Kathy and her peers are clones, created explicitly for this purpose.

(I’m not giving much away here, because Ishiguro tells us exactly this maybe 100 pages in.)

Well.  So far, it’s The Island.

Since I worked out the premise after reading for maybe twelve minutes, I spent a certain amount of time wondering when Ishiguro would make his Big Reveal— I mean, could it possibly last till the end?  But since the Big Reveal came early in the text, then I kept wondering what Ishiguro was going to spring on us that would be as big as the Big Reveal.

And then I kept wondering. And wondering.

And that is the big difference between this book and genre.  If this were an SF novel, and the characters knew that they were in a system that was set up to kill them, the characters would spend the novel trying not to be killed.  They would try to escape, they would go into hiding, they would attempt revolution, they would try to hack the system, they would exchange information, they would do research about what’s going on, they’d steal a boat and sail across the Channel, they would riot, they would blow up Parliament.  They would obsess about not being killed, all their conversations would be about how not to be killed, and they would make one attempt after another not to be killed.  Not being killed would become their, I dunno, raison d’être in the most literal way.

But  that’s not what happens in Ishiguro’s novel.  What happens in this book is a coming-of-age story set in a lovely English school, and then, after the characters grow older, a lovely civilized English nation.  We hear a lot more about Kathy’s experiences with her big-hearted friend Tommy and her social-climbing, bossy, quite unendurable friend Ruth than we ever hear about donations and clones.  We hear about Kathy’s personal realizations about her friends, we hear about relations with teachers, we hear about excursions to other towns, and about tensions within her group as Ruth tries to run everyone’s lives for them.

The characters are only vaguely curious about their fates, and this makes them seem pretty thick.  They have questions, but don’t really try to get them answered— there seems to be no Internet on which some basic answers might be found, and there don’t even seem to be libraries where the characters might be able to discover a little information about their reality and how it got that way.

Where the novel derives its power is from the contrast between the civilized Englishness of the characters and surroundings, and the horror that we know surrounds them.  This is effective, but it’s also a bit frustrating for the reader.  I kept wanting the characters to notice at least as much about their reality as I did.

Part of the business of writing an SF novel is “worldbuilding,” which consists of building the scaffolding that makes the story plausible. For instance, if you’re writing a story about characters who are repressed and killed, there would be people onstage who would be repressive and murderous.  There would be jackbooted guards, there would be sadistic scientists, there would be some insanely totalitarian government.  You’d have explanations of how all these things came to pass.  If you’re writing about transplanting organs, you might include a lot of medical information.

Ishiguro doesn’t bother with any of that, and it’s probably the right decision.  He keeps the medical stuff vague, which is a good idea because his scientific premises are pretty much nonsense.  (He mentions, for example, that transplants can prevent cancer.)  And there doesn’t seem to be any agency or individuals charged with implementing the donation program– nobody carrying a warrant card shows up at your door and hauls you off to hospital to donate your spleen, and there doesn’t seem to be any way of punishing people who don’t obey the rules— but then there’s nobody in the story that breaks the rules, so we don’t know.  All the clones are too civilized, English, and diffident to be able to articulate a protest, let alone make one.  Nobody runs away, nobody blows up Parliament.  Instead they have tea and crumpets and talk about their days at school.

And that, it occurs to me, is another difference between literary fiction and genre.  Genre is often about fighting Fate: you love the person you’re not supposed to, or you fight evil, or you solve a mystery and free the person who’s unjustly accused, or you stand up to authority, or you liberate Middle-Earth from a dictator.  And in genre, you’re allowed to do these things.

In literary fiction, Fate is something you cannot escape.  You’re doomed to be Rabbit Angstrom from the second you’re born.  Or Joe Christmas.  Or Blanche Dubois.  Or Oedipus, Cassandra, Gilgamesh, Jason.  Or the butler Stevens, from Ishiguro’s own Remains of the Day.  If you attempt to escape your fate, you become Jay Gatsby and are destroyed far more thoroughly than if you approached your life with the proper resignation.

Never Let Me Go might, I suppose, be viewed as a political allegory.  After all, a degree of our material comfort is dependent on sweat shops and child labor in foreign countries.  The computer on which I write these lines was assembled in a factory infamous for the number of suicides among its despairing workers.  We’ve all pretty much agreed not to think about that. and maybe we wouldn’t spare a lot of thought if China began shipping us crates of spleens, livers, hearts, and kidneys.

But the metaphor fails because of distance.  The sweatshops of China are a long way off.  If the sweatshops were in England or North America, they’d be illegal.  If there were classes of people here created to be massacred, there would be intense curiosity about them, probably even by people who viewed them as subhuman.  There would be media stories, Internet harangues, pressure groups, podcasts, interviews with Hailsham students, with doctors and administrators. (Consider all the stories about Guantanamo.)  China is, in many ways, still a closed country: Ishiguro’s sunny, normal England is not.

So the novel fails both as a political fable and as a realistic depiction of its subject, assuming of course that it attempted to do either (which I doubt).  So what delights might the reader expect should she progress to the end of the work?

Though the Big Reveal happens early on, there are a number of smaller questions raised in the course of the novel.  (For instance, why go to the trouble of creating a large first-class boarding school for people designated to be nothing more than spare parts, when you could as easily raise them in dog kennels?)  All these questions get answered in one spectacularly long lumpy expository conversation near the end of the book.  (The protagonists are too incurious to figure anything out for themselves, so they have to find someone to explain it all to them.)

The chief virtues you find in Never Let Me Go is the same virtue you find elsewhere in Ishiguro, which amounts to a  meticulously observed, sympathetic secondary world.  Ishiguro plausibly inserts himself into the head of an eight-yer-old girl, the same girl at twelve, the same girl at sixteen.  All of the little dramas of growing up are beautifully described, as is the protagonist’s friend Ruth, who is exactly the horrible, manipulative, self-centered monster you encounter in high school, but who somehow ends up your friend anyway.

Either this is the sort of thing you like to read, or it isn’t.  (For me, it’s Not Enough.)

But it’s a book by an absolute talent, touching on our own peculiar world, so if you find it on a shelf somewhere, give it a look and see if it’s something worth your while.