Book review

[icepixie]

Well, I wanted to like Never Let Me Go (the novel, not the movie, which I haven't seen), but...come on. If you've read even one sci-fi novel you knew what the twist was from approximately chapter two, and the most interesting parts--how this process actually came to be (surely there was public outcry?), all the socio-political implications of what they were doing, why whether the clones have souls at all was even a question and what various people thought about it--were skimmed over in one chapter near the end.

Also: Really, not one person tried to escape this system? For real? Because I find this hard to believe, and I would much rather have read the story of someone who escaped and caused a revolution or something. Or at least an explanation of why no one even thought to challenge the system.

And one more thing--let's be real here, no way would any one in charge of that system take out organs one by one and let the clones recover in between. They'd harvest everything at once and save money. Assuming they were growing organs in living people rather than vats anyway, which also begs explanation. When Miss Emily mentioned "in the fifties, after the war," I thought, "Aha! So Hitler won the war and unleashed all his evil Nazi science on the world, and the reason everyone has an initial instead of a last name is because the last names are all GERMAN!" But...no? Or actually, maybe, since the background was vague enough that almost anything might've happened before the book begins. Dear Mr. Ishiguro, if you're going to write a sci-fi novel (and newsflash to Vintage: YOU TOTALLY PUBLISHED A SCI-FI NOVEL), you need to actually do some worldbuilding.

ETA: And the clones "can't" have children, which implies scientific tinkering, which implies the possibility of further scientific tinkering--of either growing organs in a vat, of making them able to regenerate harvested organs (that's what I figured was going on for much of the book, because at least the multiple operations would make sense), or something like that. But...no. Why not?

So basically, the plot of the book appears to be having the audience slowly deduce the twist, except the twist was deducible from way too early, so we were left with no actual story and a lot of logic holes. Bah.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I agree entirely - thanks for writing this, I was beginning to think I was the only one who thought this book was badly-done sci-fi rather than some kind of intensely subtle 'literary fiction'. Good point about the organ harvesting, too.