Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005 (August 2013)
This book was both touching and puzzling. I read it knowing the basic premise, having read the reviews and seen the movie. And yet I found several times in reading it a wave of shock and sorrow in realizing that I was reading the intimate lives of people who are being raised to be harvested for the benefit of a more privileged group. Though drawn in very accepting and low-key way, the picture described is an imagined holocaust, just more humane and genteel than the historical holocaust. I think it gets this power from the writing, which lets the reader into the minds of a sympathetic group of people with very ordinary cares and personal troubles, so that the theoretical knowledge of the storyline suddenly becomes something that affects realistic characters.
And yet, there seems to be a major flaw in the story, in
that these characters know their fate but do nothing about it. In fact, they
help in it, with the population acting as Carers for the Donors, before
becoming Donors themselves. Having just seen the film, Hannah Arendt, which
touches on the complicity of Jewish community leaders in facilitating the
Holocaust, I wonder if Ishiguro is drawing a parallel – except that there was
more resistance among the ordinary Jewish population than there is among these
characters. There is nothing explicit in the text making a parallel to the
Holocaust, so perhaps this is a parallel in my own mind, though it brings up
thoughts of Joseph Mengele and his inhuman experiments on camp inmates.
The story is told entirely in the voice of Kathy, a
sympathetic Carer reflecting on her relationships as a child and a young adult.
As one of the chosen donors, she has a limited view of the situation so the
reader is left to infer the reality from her descriptions – for example, the shoddy
standards at the supposed elite school that she attended. (In this perspective and
the long rides across the English countryside, the narrative is similar to The
Remains of The Day, another novel reflecting on self-deception and fascism.) And
yet, the students she encounters from other schools seem no different from her
schoolmates, in spite of the intellectual training in the classics and the arts
that Hailsham students are given in order see if they have, or perhaps can
develop, a soul. Clearly they seem to have one, even Tommy who resists the
humanities training and the students from other schools. But they are entirely
passive, and that cannot be a matter of their training and their understanding
of their sacrifice.
Interesting also is the character of Madame and Miss Emily –
good liberals who want to make life better for the students, but give up when
they encounter obstacles and watch, with anger and bitterness, at an outcome
they know is wrong. But they don’t act. Everyone is passive (possibly excepting
Miss Lucy, who seems to be driven out of Hailsham when she resists a little.
A central theme in the story is memory – Kathy frequently
questions her memories or those of others, as she reconstructs her story so
that it makes sense to her. Ironically, this too recalls the Holocaust memorial
and the slogan Never Forget. Kathy doesn’t forget, but she does seem to
interpret her memories in the most comforting way.
Some reviewers have
said this novel is about caring for others in a hopeless situation, as the
Carers do, or about living with hope for a better future. Although there are
oddities in the narration, this is a complex book that raises a variety of
serious questions for meditation.
