Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum
But how would they live? They haven’t been trained to do anything in order to earn a living. They have been kept, like farm animals. I don’t think they had any real options, as they wouldn’t have anyone to help them.
If they tried to get some sort of job, it would probably become clear very quickly from their inability to do anything, that they were clones, and they would have been handed over to the authorities.
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They can drive. As carers, they've been in the real world and should have acquired basic real-world skills--handling money, cooking, whatever. They can read and write. They've been taught to "pass" and apparently do.
There's no suggestion that ANY clone has ever tried to leave and been dragged back and punished for it, providing some deterrent for the others. We do know that couples keep trying to get the imaginary deferrals, and the belief in those deferrals continues, which indicates a desire to escape their fate. Yet none of those disappointed couples ever try to run away?
Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
@Catlady. My reaction to the book was very similar to yours. Though I was able to suspend my disbelief I found the lack of background and detail and the deliberate vagueness very frustrating. And the essential lack of plot. It was just about everything I hate in a lot of literary fiction. Ironically, your objections on the basis of credibility are the same objections that many lovers of Science Fiction would have. I'm most impressed that you got through it.
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In terms of plot, I would have preferred a story about a clone and a "normal" person falling in love and trying to escape--hardly original, but still a structure to allow a consideration of whatever themes the author wanted to explore.
I was especially annoyed with the information dump--the whole find-and-talk-to-Madame scenario raised my expectations of a significant reveal in the offing. But it was a whole lot of nothing.
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Originally Posted by gmw
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.
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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. |
Interesting, but I don't find it analogous. There's a huge difference between living somewhere with an average low life expectancy, and, in our book, knowing you are going to be chopped up on an operating table and die because of it. One is a maybe, the other is a certainty. And I'm sure that some people do move out of Glasgow; none of the clones try to escape.
Rather than passivity, I would have liked to see in the clones an exaggerated sense of altruism. Suppose they'd been taught to be self-sacrificing and noble, to feel they were performing a great service to humanity--which they are. I think that would have been a lot more interesting, but there's nothing to support it in the novel.