[gmw]

fantasyfan, I really like the comparisons you raise. I find them very apt.

I think these stories provide pessimistic outcomes deliberately. A hopeful conclusion would detract from the impact that the authors are trying to have on their audience and would reduce the strength of the message.

One of the things I found interesting about Never Let Me Go was how little attempt was made to give a larger context. We rarely see anyone who is not one of the clones/slaves. What fantasyfan described as pastoral I felt as isolated and isolating. The effect is emphasised when we get what little explanation is made in the meeting* with Madame and Miss Emily. The wider world doesn't want to know about these clones, so of course they are isolated (indeed, self-isolating).

(* I was going to say confrontation rather than meeting, but these clones never really do anything that might qualify as confrontation - and I think is an important part of the explanation for their unnerving passivity: they were raised to never be confronting. Tommy with his early, undirected, temper-tantrums was an exception eventually brought under control by peer pressure. Notice that it wasn't, overtly, by the guardians. I think this is an important part of the story: the clones do a lot of what is needed by themselves, to each other. We humans can be good at that.)

The clones are "told and not told" of their role in the world, as we can imagine the wider population is also "told and not told" of their own role. It is difficult for us to imagine being raised as a collection of spare-parts and not ever questioning that ... but I think that is part of what it leaves sitting in your mind after you finish: what are we accepting of now, without trying to imagine that it could be different?

It's not like the book lacks historical precedent: slavery and suffrage to name two obvious examples. Generations after the first voices were raised to try and change the situation we are still fighting racism and sexism and other prejudices. What may seem like the most appalling things to us now once seemed only natural and just (hanged, drawn and quartered, anyone?); and some of what seems natural and just now may well seem appalling to future generations - or vice versa? Could we ever revert? As this story suggests, all it takes is raising children in isolation, telling them only what you choose for them to know.


There is a lot to not like about this book from the perspective of a science fiction story. So much is not explained, or seems not really credible in a strict science fiction sense (perhaps only because it is not explained). Indeed, even the setting the story is not entirely clear. (Is it alternative history or set in the future? It didn't seem to me that this was absolutely stated.) But it turns out that this, that I might normally find annoying, is one of the things that I think makes the story work for me. The vagueness of the setting, the uneducated simplicity of the telling, makes it all seem real and convincing and important in a way that more explicit explanation may have distracted from. (I found this recently in another book, where the long and detailed "world building" came across as exactly that, "world building" - and only artificial worlds need building and explaining so of course the story felt artificial.)

The lack of explicit explanation also means that what may seem like holes may merely be lack of knowledge, or lack of imagination on our own part, and that in itself leaves you thinking about the book. For, if nothing else, this is a book that left me thinking about it long after completion. ... And I'll never think of the word "completion" in quite the same way again.