MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - New Leaf September 2018 Discussion • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

gmw · 09-19-2018, 01:43 AM

With mortality being one of the themes of this work, I was doing a bit of hunting around for information about life expectancy and came across the Glasgow effect.

First there is the obvious thing (quoted from here): "In Glasgow, the disparity is amongst the highest in the world: life expectancy for males in the heavily deprived Calton area stands at 54, which is 28 years less than in the affluent area of Lenzie, which is only 8 km away."

Notice that the difference is about the expected life span of one of our clones.

There is also (from the first link): "The city's mortality gap was not apparent until 1950 and seems to have widened since the 1970s", which struck me as conveniently in synchronisation with the alternative history of our story. Catlady asked why our protagonists didn't just drive way, we might well ask some Glaswegians the same question. Escape seems obvious to outsiders, it's not so obvious when it's the world you live in.

What I'm getting at here is that Ishiguro constructed a situation in which the protagonists mortality and passivity have been exaggerated so that it seems overtly unfair - and even unreasonable - to the reader, but for all that I keep finding examples that make his story seem less of exaggeration than we might assume.

09-19-2018, 01:43 AM	#62
gmw cacoethes scribendi Posts: 5,818 Karma: 137770742 Join Date: Nov 2010 Location: Australia Device: Kobo Aura One & H2Ov2, Sony PRS-650	With mortality being one of the themes of this work, I was doing a bit of hunting around for information about life expectancy and came across the Glasgow effect. First there is the obvious thing (quoted from here): "In Glasgow, the disparity is amongst the highest in the world: life expectancy for males in the heavily deprived Calton area stands at 54, which is 28 years less than in the affluent area of Lenzie, which is only 8 km away." Notice that the difference is about the expected life span of one of our clones. There is also (from the first link): "The city's mortality gap was not apparent until 1950 and seems to have widened since the 1970s", which struck me as conveniently in synchronisation with the alternative history of our story. Catlady asked why our protagonists didn't just drive way, we might well ask some Glaswegians the same question. Escape seems obvious to outsiders, it's not so obvious when it's the world you live in. What I'm getting at here is that Ishiguro constructed a situation in which the protagonists mortality and passivity have been exaggerated so that it seems overtly unfair - and even unreasonable - to the reader, but for all that I keep finding examples that make his story seem less of exaggeration than we might assume. Last edited by gmw; 09-19-2018 at 01:46 AM.