New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | October 10, 2005

Mike Godwin reviews Kazuo Ishiguro's clone-slave bildungsroman.

Comments

|10.10.05 @ 10:33AM|#

The link to the review doesn't seem to work.

Warren|10.10.05 @ 10:42AM|#

It would appear the review was dropped in the memory hole. I wonder what it said that they don't want us to know?

Jeff P.|10.10.05 @ 1:33PM|#

This is the book that, according to the author, isn't science fiction because it deals with what it means to be human.
We've been hearing a lot of this lately.
A reminder that it was Ray Bradbury who said that the 1950's definition of SF was a plot driven by technology, and by that definition Singin' In The Rain counts as SF while Martian Chronicles doesn't.

|10.10.05 @ 5:50PM|#

Heh. It's not science fiction mainly because it's marketed as literary fiction. The publishers certainly won't complain about science fiction readers recognizing it as such if it sells more books.

It does deal with what it means to be human, and I think it's interesting that Ishiguru framed it in what can be seen as an animal rights model. The narrator and her two friends are "lucky" enough to grow up in Hailsham, a posh free-range sort of clone farm started by do-gooders to improve the quality of life of the clones and perhaps prove that they do have souls. But the Hailsham students, cossetted though their upbringing may be compared to the other clones, are destined for the same processing plant in the end. The book is harrowing in its utter loneliness, as piece by piece, the three main characters let themselves go to others.

|10.10.05 @ 8:42PM|#

Indeed, even a casual reader of Never Let Me Go can see how little the author (who has become known in his other work for painstaking craftsmanship) cares for whether this whole cloning-for-spare-parts scenario is politically or scientifically credible.

Then what's the point? The best science fiction takes an (at this time) impossible contrivance; FTL travel, artificial intelligence, extraterrestrials, cloning, an all-encompassing surveillance society, etc. and pitches it to the reader in such a way that s/he finds no reason to question it. From there it builds upon human implications of a fantastic premise. The very best scifi will give you a new way of looking at those implications.

But, for the life of me, I can't buy into Ishiguro's contrivance for three reasons:

1)I cannot see a modern society tolerating this. We live in a world where people like Jehova's Witnesses refuse to take blood transfusions, to say nothing of the theocratic nutjobs who freak out over even the cloning and growth of stem cells. Perhaps things in Great Britain are different and my perception is colored by my primarily American cultural world view.

2)As a book, the science fiction contrivance (Are cloned people truly human?) and examined cultural implications (Yes, of course) is simply too pat. So what? What's thought provoking about that? In the end, it doesn't challenge the reader to think about something in a new way, it just reinforces what they already believe to be true. In that respect it fails as a work of scifi, and, quite frankly, I think the genre of scifi should distance itself from this book just as much as Ishiguro and the mad line of yammering reviewers are attempting to distance it from scifi.

3)Godwin touches on plot points that deal with people who are able to rationalize horrible things, both to themselves and others. But then why the need for a scifi contrivance? History is full of examples of this; at the risk of pulling a Godwin, you have the German civilians who rationalized or ignored the systematic slaughter of Jews, to the Americans who put Japanese-Americans into internment camps, to the Hutu and Tutsi tribemembers who wantonly slaughtered each other with machetes. Heck, I'm utterly pro-choice with regard to the abortion debate, but I would find a pro-life slanted novel from the point of view of an abortion provider more interesting than this. The world is full of people doing terrible things or having terrible things done to them, and rationalizing their position. Heck, he need not even use a historical time period, instead choosing to create a fictional, but reality-based one. In the end, I think this makes Ishiguro guilty of the worst crime one can make when writing scifi: using a speculative plot contrivance when it is not needed.

In the end, I will admit that this is based purely on conjecture. I've not read Never Let Me Go and fully acknowledge that my impression, based on hearing an interview on NPR and reading a couple of reviews, could be completely mistaken.

But I kinda doubt it.

Tim Cavanaugh|10.11.05 @ 10:06AM|#

History is full of examples of this; at the risk of pulling a Godwin, you have the German civilians who rationalized or ignored the systematic slaughter of Jews, to the Americans who put Japanese-Americans into internment camps, to the Hutu and Tutsi tribemembers who wantonly slaughtered each other with machetes.

And what of the English butlers who apologized for their pro-fascist bosses? Why hasn't Ishiguro ever written a book about that?

|10.11.05 @ 11:30AM|#

Tim-

Admittedly, I haven't read "The Remains of the Day" but yes, that would be a perfect example. My point is that there seems to be no need for the scifi trappings of his latest novel. What grates on me is that he has written a scifi book that doesn't really seem to need the scifi trappings to examine the personal/societal/whathaveyou implications, and then he and his reviewers go to great lengths to point out that this is a work of literature not scifi.

That just grates on me, smacking of priggish literary snobbery.

The antithesis of this would be Neal Stephenson, whose last few books have been anything but scifi, but still are able to contain the best element of the genre; the examination of sociological/cultural/personal/political implications of major changes brought about by societal influence or a few enterprising individuals. Stephenson openly embraces scifi's tradition of looking at things from a fresh perspective, despite having dropped the fantastical trappings. Even then, Stephenson has no qualms about having the thematic scifi elements of these books brought up in discussion.

|10.11.05 @ 12:43PM|#

Godwin touches on plot points that deal with people who are able to rationalize horrible things, both to themselves and others. But then why the need for a scifi contrivance? History is full of examples of this...

One advantage of using a science fiction backdrop instead of a historial one, though, is that you can examine a facet of human existence with a fresh perspective, without the baggage of an actual incident from history.

|10.11.05 @ 6:37PM|#

This is the book that, according to the author, isn't science fiction because it deals with what it means to be human. We've been hearing a lot of this lately.

You hear it every time the author thinks he can gain or retain some lit-credibility by denying that it has the gauche taint of genre...or when the author or publisher thinks they can make more money that way.

|10.12.05 @ 12:24AM|#

Stevo, this is true. But the setting need not necessarily be historical.

But this gets back to one of my primary gripes: what purpose does his use of a scifi backdrop serve?

Is it to get us to question whether or not a clone of a person is truly human? Are there honestly people out there that need to read a novel to get them to think about this? Really?

Or is the purpose of the novel to get us to examine how people cope and rationalize what little they have when they are in horrible circumstances? In that case, what purpose does the cloning angle serve? Call me a cynic, but it smacks of nothing more than a veneer slapped onto an examination of humanity in order to make it seem timely.

"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled Science Fiction and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal. -Kurt Vonnegut