[Catlady]

Originally Posted by gmw

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.

These reasons are not in the text, not even hinted at in the text.

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

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.

I don't believe I said anything about "important"; if I did, it was in the context of making them feel they were acting for a greater good, inspiring feelings of altruism and nobility and self-sacrifice, etc. Saying they are "special" and shouldn't smoke because they need to stay healthy isn't exactly an inspirational message.

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.

Chekhov's gun principle is not limited to murder mysteries; it applies to all good fiction writing. It's not a matter of "clues"; it's a matter of setting up the story so that all the pieces eventually fall into place because every detail was carefully chosen.

And the better writers, whether genre or literary, don't need to rely on an information dump.

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.

My frame of mine is just fine; it's the book that's lacking. You say there are no distractions? I say the book is filled with distractions--implausibilities, pieces that don't fit, scientific anomalies, the aforesaid information dump.

"Feelings and questions"? Are they supposed to be a substitute for plot? What questions am I supposed to have? Am I supposed to wonder about the morality of cloning humans? Did that in college ethics courses decades ago. Am I supposed to be amazed at the idea of learned helplessness? Been there, done that. Just what are the great insights I'm supposed to glean from this book and ponder?

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.

You're being quite dismissive of genre fiction.

Without conflict, there's no story. The romantic triangle was at least mildly interesting because the characters were in conflict and you have the push-pull of competing loyalties and motives. The larger context of clones as a donor class was just a given; we didn't even know about "miracle cures" or how they fit into society as a whole until the information dump. To a certain extent, the clone aspect was background noise.