One Book, One Community…One Reader?
I’m taking part in a community project that seems a little dormant right now. New Hanover County’s One Book, One Community, whose mission is to “promote literacy and a love for reading, celebrate diversity, and foster a community of readers by providing opportunities to explore and discuss a common text,” has chosen Kazuo Ishiguro’s unsettling novel Never Let Me Go for this year. I’ve just finished the book and loved it, have been thinking about it quite a lot. Now I want to discuss it, write about it, stop the man in the street!
The idea of OBOC is that a whole community read a single book and that this be the basis for discussion, commonalities, debate. The book itself is mind-altering and very, very well-written in this reader’s opinion. I just can’t get over how well — and how subtly — Ishiguro manages the thoughts and intentions of the characters. They are perfectly rendered and perfectly familiar in an otherwise strange and dystopic, future-is-now landscape. And the ethical implications! Just the fact that Ishiguro unwinds what is actually the situation so slowly…
UNCW has broadened the one-book-community by including UNCW undergrads, too: All entering freshmen are required/exhorted to have read Never Let Me Go this summer before starting classes in the fall, when presumably there’ll be some discussion and literary checking-in. This is part of the university’s “Common Reading Experience“. (Last year they did this at Chapel Hill with Tyson’s Blood Done Signed My Name and caused a predictable mini-stir. I think the Koran was a choice in years past as well?) Too, the county libraries are involved in New Hanover’s One Book One Community, along with high schools, the Star News, reading groups, local bookstores.
But that’s the thing. It’s such a great idea but it doesn’t seem to have gelled into an actual community project. (Or has it? Am I missing a party somewhere?) It’s not for lack of planning: The site itself, the resources, the collaboration across these various smaller communities, the sheer effort to get this going….But where would I discuss this book with others? With whom? How does one discuss the book across these various agencies and small groups?
Have you read the book? Want to? Can we discuss it, please?
Thanks for your post about One Book One Community. We’ve organized a number of events at UNCW and in the community for people just like yourself who are interested in discussing the book.
In the calendar section of the OBOC website, you’ll find numerous book discussions, lectures, films, and other events which are free and open to all members of the community. I encourage you to attend one of the upcoming book discussions at the New Hanover County Main Library on Sept. 11 or the Northeast Regional Branch Library on September 16th to find like-minded readers discussing Ishiguro’s stunning work.
Hope to see you there!
Ameet
I read ‘Never Let Me Go’ a few months back. Here is my review:
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (Jun 2007)
This novel is ostensibly about a group of cloned children who are raised in a private British school for the sole purpose that their bodies could later be harvested for their vital organs, which, in turn, would be supplied to the people whose own such organs have become dysfunctional due to various diseases and illnesses.
When I discovered the plot of the book, I was delighted. I thought to myself, this book is about such a controversial and highly-charged subject: breeding humans so that their bodies could be cannibalized later. And not just humans, but cloned humans. Cloning itself is a topic that is crawling with potential social, moral, and religious issues.
But I have to sadly report that Mr. Ishiguro’s novel is not about any of the above. In fact, having read the book from cover to cover, I am still not sure what the book is about. One of the biggest problems of Never Let Me Go is that it remains completely unfocused throughout its length.
Mr. Ishiguro refuses to deal with the ethical, scientific, social dimensions that are inherent in the practice of cloning. He refuses to deal with the personal anxieties of the clones themselves as they might find themselves pariahs and social misfits in the world. He refuses to deal with the fact that by the time these clones were in their teens, they were fully aware that they were destined for a slow and painful death by way of surgical removal of their body parts one after the other.
Then what does he deals with in his book? Mr. Ishiguro meticulously describes the juvenile skirmishes among the trio of friends at Hailsham but they are like the skirmishes any children or adolescents would face in their growing up together. These children who were raised without the loving and watchful gaze of parents, didn’t just lose their parents like normal orphans, but they never had any to begin with. These children never knew any siblings in life. And what’s more, these children never set foot outside Hailsham. Let me repeat, till these children were in their teens, they had never ever seen experienced the outside world directly. Despite leading very sheltered and even unnatural lives during their formative years, they seemed to come to terms with the real world seamlessly. Even a normal person who has spent a substantial amount of time inside a prison needs ample time and effort on his part to “de-institutionalize,” but all these angles about the lives of the clones were never addressed by Mr. Ishiguro at all.
Also, we are told that the people of the world in general were very uncomfortable discussing clones and the way they were raised. This issue is similar to the one about cruelty to those animals who are involved in medical experiments, a thorny subject. Such cruelty is only tolerated due to its utlimate beneficial consequenes to humans. But when these clones go out in the world, we are never told about their relationships with normal humans; did normal people look down upon them, did they regard them as martyrs who were sacrificing their bodies and ulimately their lives for the good of mankind, did the people receive the clones warmly, or were they given the cold shoulder. Mr. Ishiguro again refuses to even acknowledge this dimension of the social lives of the clones.
Moreover, we are never told about the possibility of a clone deciding not to go ahead with his donations. What if the clone simply ran away and disappeared in the world to lead a normal life. I mean, after all, Mr. Ishiguro has led us to believe that clones are just like normal people with the only difference that they can’t reproduce. But that’s all right, one could still lead a normal life without having any children. So why didn’t they try?
The whole book was very flat and lacked any sensibility or emotional warmth. Towards the last ten pages or so, when Mr. Ishiguro tried to come up with a touching ending, he seemed to fall flat on his face. Tommy, one of the clones, describes to Kathy, that he feels as if both of them were flowing down a fast-moving river and trying to hold onto each other desperately. The analogy was so juvenile and so very melodramatic that Mr. Ishiguro’s attempt to evoke any sympathy towards the clones failed miserably.
Some readers might argue that Mr. Ishiguro didn’t intend to address most of the above issues directly and he just touched upon them obliquely. But then the whole point of the book seems to get lost. If the book refuses to discuss the issues arising naturally from the very existence of the clones, then we are left with a bunch of normal teenagers with their anxieties and fears which would be not very different from those of ordinary ones.
The clones seemed to grasp fully by the time they were sixteen or so or even before that they were being raised so that their bodies could be harvested for their vital organs. Now this is not an easy fact to live with. The gravity of this revelation and its consequences do not seem to perpetually loom over their lives as a shadow as one would expect.
The life of a clone after having discovered its purpose shouldn’t be very different from a condemned man who has been sentenced to die. Even if he spends many long years waiting for the lethal injection, when the time arrives eventually, he wouldn’t be expected to meet his death without debilitating fear and extreme anxiety, to put things mildly. But that is just what our clones seemed to do.
Let me present you this scenario: you are about sixteen years old, you have just graduated from a high-class private school, and you know that very soon you’d be starting out your life as a carer which would lead to you becoming a donor yourself. With every donation, you’d be losing a crucially important organ of your body, and usually the fourth donation would either result in your painful death or a vegetative state of existence at best.
With you being fully aware of this scenario, would you then go ahead and spend two years of your life writing an essay about your favourite literature? I mean how natural is that? How obtuse and stupid is that? And to what point and purpose? Why were the clones awarded such projects at all?
You are a human farm cultivated just for your vital organs, what point would it serve for you to write an essay on the music of Mozart. Rather, one would think that as soon as a clone reached maturity, his body would be cannibalized for his organs. Why make him/ her serve his time as a carer. Any of the regular people could act as carers. With the world clamouring for organ donations, one would expect that the clones would be harvested for their body parts soonest possible, but here they spend two years writing their theses on their favourite topics and then spend years and years being carers before they get their notification to become a donor themselves.
They were about sixteen years of age when they graduated from Hailsham which means that for each donation of a liver or kidney, the world would have to wait sixteen years. Now that is a very long time, and then to add two years to that waiting period by awarding the clones their theses is simply a grossly stupid idea which is criminally flippant to the very purpose the clones were brought into the world: to serve normal medical patients.
The whole scenario which Mr. Ishiguro presented in his book was laughable and ludicrous. He never discussed the various dimensions of cloning which would haunt any civilized society, and neither he portrayed their anxieties and fears as people with certain death hanging over them. With these two points missing, there was never a third point to write about with a novel with this particular plot.
I really don’t know what the book was about. If it was a coming-of-age novel it didn’t do justice to its charactes because it kept on describing in fragments and snapshots the childish fights its characters had with each other, the adolescent jealousies, the immature arguments. And if it was a novel told from the point of view of a clone about the cruel world that brought him/ her into existence just to feed off its body, then it didn’t even address that angle satisfactorily. The kind of anxiety, fear, hopelessness, helplessness and panic that one would expect from a human being who had discovered that the clock was ticking for him and the doctors were hovering with their scalpels ready to carve out the organs of his body, was missing altogether from the book.
Mr. Ishiguro’s book seems to be full of self-contradicting statements. On the one hand, the principal of the school, Miss Emily, seems to have devoted most of her life towards caring for the clones, humanizing them in the eyes of the world, getting the world to treat them like normal human beings.
When she sees Kathy, our narrator, with the pillow clutched to her breast and singing a romantic song, she breaks down into tears. And yet, when a young couple, including the very same Kathy, approach her with a request for a deferral, which is nothing but a kind of plea to delay their deaths, despite the fact that she is extremely moved, she is very dismissive towards them and her attention keeps wandering to the furniture-movers who had just arrived.
And what never stopped surprising me was Mr. Ishiguro’s complete inability to write naturalistic dialogues. Every single line his characters uttered sounded phony and forced and unnatural and feeble. Everything sounded stilted and halting. If the word ‘daft’ was used once more, I had promised I’d shoot myself.
I just couldn’t believe that this was the book that was on the Booker Prize list. I had to force myself to turn the book over and look at the cover several times just to ensure myself that I was indeed reading the same book. Man, if the Booker judges liked this one, they must be a really sorry bunch of people. They should read more interesting, more intellectual stuff. Not garbage like this pretending to be literature.
This novel is supposed to be a masterpiece of restraint and deeply-buried anguish….Well, the anguish must be buried very deep indeed. I looked real hard but could never find it. Mr. Ishiguro shares with us Kathy’s memories which are so trivial and mundane, the reader can’t help but become exasperated quickly. Pages and pages are devoted to silly episodes like losing a favourite cassette tape, helping to calm down a good friend down after his classmates play a trick on him, pondering the origins of a friend’s new pencil case…and so on.
To me it seemed as if Mr. Ishiguro started to write a book about some priviliged children who led very sheltered lives but then at some point of time he decided that those children would be clones being raised for their body parts. But having reached this decision rather late in the book, he neither succeeded in portraying the lives of the priviliged children with any insight, nor he discussed the issues generally associated with cloning. Also, he didn’t even present to us the point-of-view of life from a clone’s perspective.
This book was an insult to my intellect and my literary sense. It wasted a week of my life. Mr. Ishiguro, please let me go….please let me go and read something interesting and intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging.
A directionless, pointless, and emotionless book about nothing, really.