[gmw]

Originally Posted by Catlady

Which still leaves the question, why? Why did the author choose to tell us they are sterile? Why does he have them hear lectures about sex and how they need to be careful about sex with non-clones in the outside world because they take it more seriously than the clones? What is the point he's making with this information? Why is it included?

It's an important part of the context. The choice by Ishiguro was obviously deliberate, and not a lack of research or imagination. At a technical level, I and others gave various reasons why sterile clones might be preferable to fertile ones (see here). At the immediate story level I think sterility and sex speaks to the nature of the clones.

Sex even gets tied to the title of the book. Madame watching Kathy dancing to the song, Never Let Me Go, as if with a baby, and a couple of years later Kathy and Tommy trying to find an explanation as to why Madame was upset. Amid that conversation is this:

By then, of course, we all knew something I hadn’t known back then, which was that none of us could have babies. [...] I remember some people being pleased we could have sex without worrying about all of that [...] Anyway, when I told Tommy about what had happened, he said:

‘Madame’s probably not a bad person, even though she’s creepy. So when she saw you dancing like that, holding your baby, she thought it was really tragic, how you couldn’t have babies. That’s why she started crying.’ [...etc...]

This was part of setting up who Madame is, and what she means to Kathy and Tommy. It is also showing how sex seems very matter-of-fact among the clones while they believe it is a big deal among the normals - part of setting up the isolation between clones and normals. Also, this context may help us to understand the situation at the cottages better, and also to understand the lack of conflict in the Kathy-Tommy-Ruth triangle at that time. There's more - for me, almost everything in this book feels tied in some way to everything else.

Your questions had me collect the next bit about the fact that the clones are not supposed to smoke:

‘You’ve been told about it. You’re students. You’re … special. So keeping yourselves well, keeping yourselves very healthy inside, that’s much more important for each of you than it is for me.’

You mentioned earlier something about the author never showing the clones being told they were important, whereas I'd have said that almost everything about Hailsham was doing that - albeit in a distorted manner.

Originally Posted by Catlady

I subscribe to the Chekhov's gun principle--if you show a gun on the table, that gun has to be used at some point, or why is it there? My issue with this book is that there's so much that Ishiguro throws on the table and just lets it sit there.

Sure, in a murder mystery this is supposed to be the case - and some writers take this principle so literally that they leave no mystery, because every casually mentioned detail is a known clue. The better mystery writers know that sometimes the gun on the table is used only as a distraction.

But that's not the case with Never Let Me Go. There are no distractions. It is a book sparse of detail, so that everything that is mentioned feels important. In most cases the importance/purpose is contextual, it's that sort of book, part of setting up the feelings and questions in the reader's mind. If you're not in a receptive frame of mind you're going to miss the connections.


The following may be a bit presumptuous, I hope you'll excuse it.

Some of your comments might be derived from a genre-writers' advice column about finding sources of possible conflict in the story and using that to drive the action or character interactions. (The possibility of sex between clones and normals, or that supposedly sterile clones might find a way to breed, or that some clones might become rebellious or try to escape, and so on.)

It's good advice, as far as it goes, for standard genre fiction. Just one of the many guidelines that exist to help authors of such fiction to stay on the straight and narrow path (to keep to the conventions that modern readers expect). But I never really expected Ishiguro would stay on the path.

There is very little conflict in Never Let Me Go, and what there is never seems to get beyond rather childish stuff (as highlighted by bookpossum). It is my impression that this is entirely intentional (rather than lazy or accidental). So all your suggestions wondering why Ishiguro didn't introduce this or that conflict seem - to me - to be misdirected. The lack of conflict is one of the central elements of this book.