NY Times review of ‘Never Let Me Go’

An interesting review of the novel from Sarah Kerr at The New York Times.

There is no way around revealing the premise of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel. It is brutal, especially for a writer celebrated as a poet of the unspoken. But it takes a while for us to get a handle on it. Since it’s the nature of Ishiguro narrators to postpone a full reckoning of their place in the world, all we know in the early going is that we don’t quite know what’s going on.

We have inklings. The novel’s 31-year-old narrator, Kathy H., announces on the first page that she has worked for more than 11 years as a ”carer.” The people she assists in her line of work are ”donors” at a recovery center, in pain and doped up on drugs. Logic suggests that bodily organs are involved. But gently decent Kathy is our host on this journey, and instead of surveying her life in the present (that would be ”England, late 1990’s,” according to an introductory note) she likes to let her mind wander back to the years she spent with her two closest friends, Ruth and Tommy, at boarding school -a fabled, bucolic place in the countryside with the Dickens-parody name of Hailsham.

Kathy and her classmates were taught to think of themselves as supremely lucky for having gone to Hailsham. It was the best, the most privileged of schools. Still, we can hear off notes. The place was run by ”guardians,” who come across like nuns devoted to a faith other than religion. Both maternally protective and weirdly distant, these women prevented students from leaving the campus, and had them screened each week by a doctor. And they kept the kids busy with art projects that seemed freighted with meaning, as if a child’s creative output might hold a clue to her fate. ”Thinking back now,” Kathy says, ”I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves – about who we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside – but hadn’t yet understood what any of it meant.” Slowly, we’re led to see that she and her classmates are clones, reared in isolation at a special school, pampered and sheltered and encouraged to feel like children for as long as possible but trained for a mean postgraduate destiny. Read the rest here.

The Kite Runner – Chapters 1-5

We have just started our study of ‘The Kite Runner’ and we have looked at the first five chapters. If you would like some extra reading try Gradesaver.

Here is their summary of Chapter One:

The Kite Runner begins with our thus-far nameless protagonist explaining that the past cannot be forgotten. A single moment in time defined him and has been affecting him for the last twenty-six years. This moment was in 1975 when he was twelve years old and hid near a crumbling alleyway in his hometown of Kabul, Afghanistan. When the protagonist’s friend, Rahim Khan, calls him out of the blue, he knows that his past sins are coming back to haunt him even in the new life he has built in San Francisco. He remembers Hassan, whom he calls “the harelipped kite runner,” saying “For you, a thousand times over.” Rahim’s words also echo in his head, “There is a way to be good again.” These two phrases will become focal points for the rest of the novel and our protagonist’s story.

Scientists playing God?

We have been discussing the idea of ‘playing God’ and the following article from 2006 may be of interest.

Last week British scientists announced a revolutionary screening process for inherited diseases in embryos. It will be quicker and more accurate than the existing method and it will detect thousands more genetic defects than previously possible.

About 200 heritable conditions can be detected by pre-implantation diagnosis in IVF treatment so that only healthy embryos are implanted in the mother or frozen; the new technique — pre-implantation genetic haplotyping — will be able to detect nearly 6,000 diseases and conditions. As one of the British pioneers said, this changes everything. One could almost call it godlike.

What it means is that thousands of parents who are at known risk of passing on terrible disabilities and diseases will now be able to have only healthy babies. This is the best news I have heard for years.

Those who don’t know about it can perhaps hardly imagine the drawn out suffering of Huntington’s disease or Duchenne muscular dystrophy or Prader-Willi syndrome or Fragile X, both for the people affected and for their families, until death puts an end to it.

Nature is astonishingly cruel. Science, by contrast, has the power of mercy. One can only be dazzled by the inventiveness and compassion of the scientists involved in this screening breakthrough — “in action”, as Hamlet said, “how like an angel!” Admittedly genetic screening means that embryos carrying disabilities and diseases will be discarded. It is a stretch, however, to use the word destroyed, or even killed, as the test is done on embryos that are only three days old. And what is appealing about this early screening is that it offers the hope that, in the foreseeable future, abortion and late abortion will be less frequently used in dealing with serious defects and disabilities.

It will be easier and better in every way to get rid of a tiny collection of cells. This is indeed playing God, as all the usual campaigners were quick to point out last week. But what on earth is wrong with humans playing God? I am all for it, especially as God doesn’t seem to be doing it. Besides, whatever we may think about playing God and defying nature, we are doing it already and even though we don’t necessarily recognise it, we approve of it.

Read the rest here.