The story: A bunch of kids grow up in a seemingly idyllic boarding school, Hailsham, but all isn’t as it seems. We go through this experience through the eyes, or rather, recollections of Kathy H. For as far back as memory permits, they’ve been instilled with a creativity-and-health-is-paramount-to-all-else dogma. Kathy reflects on her friendship with Ruth and Tommy and the different guardians aka teachers at Hailsham. As they get older, they soon come to realise that their lives will never be like that of yours or mine. Well, certainly not mine – mine’s as fabulous as they come dah-ling! They are sterile which means they can copulate with iniquity (have to be some boons to being a clone eh, sucks to be durex right now). They also have to donate their organs to save diseased ‘originals’ (regular humans) from like the likes of cancer, motor neurone disease etc. They donate just about everything. All that creativity force-feeding was to prove ‘you had a soul at all’ according to head lady in charge and health, well no one wants a diseased lung do they.
Post-eighteen when they leave Hailsham, they are moved to several locations across the UK. Ruth, Tommy and Kathy are moved into the cottages where they meet other unfortunate souls and the most irritating couple in the world, Rod and Chrissy. Oh and Ruth decides that Tommy is the guy she wants despite all the merciless torment when they were younger. Fast-forward a bit more and just before Ruth finally kicks the bucket, she tells Kathy and Tommy that she’s sorry for keeping them apart, she always knew they were in love so decided to obstruct blah blah. She gives them the address of the ‘Madame’ of Hailsham and tells them to go and apply for a deferral. Rumour had it that
if a couple could prove they were really in love, they could apply for a deferral which meant they had a few more years to spend together before their donations. Needless to say, doesn’t happen for Kathy and Tommy and Tommy dies on his fourth donation. Boo friggin hoo. You don’t even feel sorry for the dude, he was such a weakling from day one. Anyway, novel ends with Kathy speculating some more – there’s a surprise.
Rewa’s take on things: For the first few chapters, I was bored feaces-less!!! All the Kathy’s and Ruth’s and Lucy’s of the world started to blend into one great big vanilla whole. I decided to stick it out despite almost surrendering to death by boredom but my inner fighter hung in there. Afterall, the booker nomination couldn’t have been for nothing! As I continued to plough through, what I found most remarkable about the book was Ishiguro’s knack for dropping titbits of askew information right in the middle of when one of his characters was talking about something really harmless or dull. So Kathy could be describing something to her cronies and one would casually drop in a line like ‘maybe it’s because we can’t have kids’ and the story would just go on. It was these subliminal hints that Ishiguro threw in here and there that made you realise that Hailsham certainly was no Eton from the get-go.
I sometimes wonder who Kathy was talking to, it didn’t seem totally soliloquy-esque with her numerous references to ‘you’. What irritated me about her monologue were the lapses in her memory and the circumventing. For instance, she could be trying to tell you about an argument she had with Ruth but would spend about a page describing something as mundane as a sock. I found this as irritating as bits of feta in my salad when I’ve explicitly asked the waiter to omit it! Also, I thought Ruth was a total female dog!!! Totally selfish, inconsiderate and domineering!
I also wondered why none of the characters ever bothered questioning their fate, why not rebel or ask questions or go out and get an ‘original’ to fall in love with you – love always helps eh. I’m sure the ‘original’ would have become an advocate for the freedom of the clones all for the sake of love har har har!
As inhumane as the practice is of breeding clones just to dissect and extract faster than Mengele ever could, I never really felt much sympathy for the clones. Maybe it was because they seemed so apathetic/accepting about their fate or maybe it was because we were never introduced to any ‘originals’ that I never really go the sense that it was all
real. Ahh well.
After reading the novel and with words like ‘complete’ and ‘possibles’ swimming round in my head, I went on to watch the movie – brilliantly directed and acted but as usual, not as much depth as the novel. Keira Knightley played Ruth – the character just got even more grating… My favourite part was Garfield’s screaming post-deferral rejection – finally, we get some emotion!
It’s a very thought-provoking story about humanity and love and friendship (that heifer Ruth certainly was neither a lover nor a friend!). It had so much potential to be a powerful emotive novel but it was let down by the excruciatingly slow and bland denouement. The characters felt like mere passive vessels through which Ishiguro never quite managed to tackle underlying issues of ethics and all that jazz. In the end, I couldn’t help but feel cheated – Ishiguro dragged me through 288 pages of irrelevant memories, a journey through which I learnt nothing new and didn’t even shed a tear. In the words of Swizz Beatz , on to the next one…
Read & Reviewed 