giving semblance to those passing thoughts

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro 6.2

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. 304 pages.

English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro is famous for his Booker Prize-winning Remains of the Day. Admirers praise his books for being deceptively easy to read, layered and complex studies of English society where the narrator is much less objective than he or she believes. That's a pretty big compliment, but one that may have some grounding, as Never Let Me Go is probably the best work of fiction published in the last decade that I have read so far in my life. However, the qualifications of the previous sentence are severely limiting, as 1) most of the books I have read that have been published in the last 10 years have been nonfiction, and 2) I have an admittedly low opinion of the quality of contemporary fiction, and generally stay away from it.

Ostensibly a novel about clones raised to be organ donors for "normal people," Never Let Me Go is actually a weakly plotted story that relies on the implied suspense of the narrator's smooth, cold, lyrically reflective voice to create the "soaring understatement of loss" or whatever it is that Ishiguro apparently does so well. Meticulously controlled, Never Let Me Go is a novel where the author wants you to see how carefully everything was laid out while maintaining the illusion of ease; while it is clear from the reading that Ishiguro has an impressive talent for writing, the ultimate sense of loss that the reader feels is the sense of disappointment in the story; it is to finally meet someone you have idolized all your life to find that he only talks about himself.

In the end, only two great questions remain, neither having much to do with the plot: How bad was everything else written this year, that this novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize? And more importantly, what in the world are the cartoonish, tribal-geek figures that are inserted in separations between chapters supposed to be?

VERDICT: 6.2/10.0 Eminently readable but fundamentally flawed.

posted by alice @ 4:24 PM