Hey guys ...
Long time, no see. I'm kick-starting this blog again. With a book review. I just finished reading Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. This book has been sitting on my shelf for a while and I finally got around to reading it. First of all, I had to persevere with it. In fact, when I first starting reading it, I stopped because I didn't get the story line but then I came back and I can assure you it is a very good book. :)
A little synopsis: Never Let Me Go is set in a skewed modern English society. It follows the lives of three children, Kathy (the protagonist who narrates the story), Ruth (her best friend) and Tommy, growing up in a boarding school called Hailsham. Hailsham is completely isolated from the rest of the society. From the beginning of the book, you can tell that something isn't quite right about the school and the society that they grow up in from the way that Kathy recalls her childhood and subsequent teens there. Through the book, Kathy reveals what the society is like and raises very interesting moral issues, questions and dilemmas about the modern world.
Okay, a heads up. I am going to discuss some of the most interesting themes for me in the book but that means that there WILL BE SPOILERS. So maybe go and read the book first and then come back or proceed, whichever you prefer. :)
The most interesting part of the book for me was the question about clones. SPOILERS!!! In Never Let Me Go, the children in Hailsham are clones of members of society and, when they get to a certain age, they start donating their organs and they eventually die. So, basically, they exist solely to harvest human organs. During my Spanish and French A level courses, I had to do some research into animal cloning and human cloning. Is it okay to clone humans? Should we clone ourselves in order to have a 'second chance' at life? Is it okay to use clones to harvest organs, as in this book?
In our world today, people clone their pets in order to have more time with another identical version of their dog or their cat and animal cloning is widely used in different industries. The key issue when discussing human clones is whether they deserve the same rights as 'normal' humans and whether they are capable of experiencing the same things as humans, on a physical and emotional level. Now, if clones are NOT capable of feeling or experiencing the same emotions as 'normal' humans, perhaps using them as donors and harvesting them as such is okay. Food for thought ... Personally, I don't agree with using cloning like that because, for me, it assumes a higher place than what humans should have.
But, the thing about this book that was quite chilling for me, was that we didn't discover that they were clones until we had seen them experience the same complicated emotions that we do: anger, happiness, frustration ... etc. Also, they were already resigned to their fate. They had no realistic aspirations for their lives because they knew how they would play out and how they would end, from very little children. They would joke around about being a doctor or a movie star or even a secretary or assistant and a teacher would say that they had to stop thinking like that. Their lives and their purpose was predestined and there was nothing that they could do to change that. Just think about that. Imagine waking up and knowing that your whole life had been determined and none of your hopes and aspirations meant anything.
Another very interesting theme for me was the role of art and creativity in the book. As someone who has always preferred more creative subjects at school and wants to be an author, creativity is very important for me. In Hailsham, creativity played a crucial role. The children were valued by the teachers and by the other students based on the quality of what they could create and write and draw. One of the main characters, Tommy, isn't very good at all of these things and he is bullied, quite viciously for it. But, the key thing here is that the teachers were looking at their art work to reveal their souls. I know that sounds overly dramatic but, in other words, they were trying to work out whether the clones had the emotion to create art, in whatever form that took. In the book, it is revealed that there were other boarding schools like Hailsham but none of them used art in the same way. Hailsham was an experiment in itself, to prove that the clones had the ability to be like 'normal' humans.
At certain times throughout history, in Communist Russia and Franco's Spain for instance, the teaching of art and creativity was prohibited because it encouraged people to think outside the box and challenge ideas and therefore the government. There is a very interesting story about a Russian composer who wrote a piece for a orchestra that was literally three or four notes and the last page was a page of the same note, over and over again. Looking at that, we see huge restrictions but it shows the extent to which we, as humans, create and appreciate creativity.
At the moment, there has been a lot of talk about cutting school funding for creative subjects and pushing forward Maths and Science. For me, this is very sad. I have never been good at Science and I was abysmal at Maths. I don't have a very logical brain and I think that by cutting that funding, we limit, as a society, the ability to do something that makes us inherently human.
The society in the book saw clones as evolved computers. They could function by themselves, they could live a 'normal' life but they couldn't appreciate things as humans. Hailsham saw them as more than that and that's where the importance of art came in. The clones could create beautiful things and appreciate the world around them in a way that is exclusive to human beings, showing that they were more than just donors. They could be people, like everyone else.
Anyway, I hope that made sense and I hope that it made you think about a few things. I just read through it and realised that it is a lot of rambling but hopefully you took a few things from it.
I believe that there is also a film of Never Let It Go with Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield. I've never seen it but maybe that is something that you would like to look into before/after reading the book.
As usual, thanks for reading,
Clare
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