I really was unhappy with it--i was creeped out, but i wanted more growth from the characters, not just acceptance of their fate. Why didn't anyone ever just run away to live their own life?

I assumed it was whatever people needed--a lung, a kidney, an eye, a limb, a heart, etc, until the donor died. It didn't seem to me that they were in any way not human or normal, except for their origin, and upbringing.

I think i just found it flat, and it didn't really go anywhere except toward resignation and death.

Ruth, for instance, totally had balls and dreams--she should have run, at least once, once they were in the cottages, or even after, even if she had been caught or came back or whatever. And that couple too--they should have just escaped.

i think i would have liked it better if even Miss Lucy or the caretaker guy, or one of the delivery guys at the school/compound--or anyone--had actually taken some action, even if it was to hurt or kill the kids or burn the school or something.

you saw by their actions that they weren't bred without passion or emotion or intelligence, when they could have been, as evidenced by the Morningside? doctor scandal.

i guess the deprived, kinda flat tone of the book matches what passed for their lives?

It didn't seem to me that they were in any way not human or normal

Weren't they infertile? I remember at some point they were told that the women couldn't get pregnant. So maybe there were other genetic modifications...

(Sorry, I wasn't able to read the book this month! I'll do the nominations thing at the end of the month.)

oh yeah--infertile. i don't remember anything else weird about them tho. (and even that's weird, if they're bred for parts--they should have let them have kids and put the kids in those places, like they did with slaves.)

I assumed they were infertile because they were cloned.

I liked many aspects of the book. I hated the plot and the whole "why don't they just fucking well get out of there" kind of thing. I tried really hard to just put all that out of my mind and just read the relationship between the 3 main characters.

It's been a while since I read it, though. I'll have to flip through and see what comes back.

gaspode, are clones always infertile? I assumed they were infertile because letting them have kids and families would make them too human, and would make it too hard to use them for donations.

Yeah I didn't make that clear. I think that in the book the cloning process was associated with infertility. Or did I just make that up? Maybe we don't even read that adn I just got it stuck in my head. I think the animals that have been cloned in real life are fertile (maybe reduced fertility)

I thought the book was a really great step for Ishiguro. He's always excelled at quiet depictions of situations where people are embroiled in some horror that is unknown or only partially known to them. He's one of the best contemporary writers to use subtlety and indirection as a device. What I loved about this book was his ability to create a fully formed world out of his imagination and then to show it to us in little facets and slivers. I found it very haunting.

It's easy to say "why don't they get out of there" if you are not a part of that world. What if you were a part of that world? What choices would you have? Imagine someone from another world looking at our world, the way we are continually wrapped up in consumerism, practically enslaved to multinational corporations, and blithely going on about our way as though nothing were wrong. Wouldn't they say "why don't they just get out of there?" Aren't we all Sonmis in some way?

Right, matildaben. And I really don't want to get too far down that aspect of the book, because I think it's less interesting than the whole emotional horror of the whole thing.

But! Even if we take the clones' actions out of it, then what about other people? You can't tell me that in the "outside world" (and it's really interesting how the clones live in everyday world but really don't interact with society in any meaningful way) there wouldn't be people agitating for the them. I was trying to think of a parallel, and I think that it's maybe like PETA or something? Or people that are vehemently anti-meat eating. Most of our society (for better or worse) either supports or is indifferent to...slaughterhouses, say. But there's always a vocal minority trying to get in people's faces ("meat is murder"). You can't tell me that Every Single Person in this society is just quietly complicit in the whole organ doning setup.

Heh, I know I have a point somewhere, there. I'm not so eloquent today.

More later.

Remains of the Day is one of my favorite books. Which other Ishiguro books would you rate this highly, matildaben?

yup, gas--i thought that read wrong too--

and they remained isolated from all of society even when they didn't have to, and even while living in it. Like they inhabited some slightly time-shifted or parallel world in ours.

this is interesting, from the NYT review of it: ...Before becoming a full-time writer in the early 1980's, he spent three years as a social worker, assisting homeless people. In interviews he has described both his idealism during that era and the disillusionment he ultimately felt. ...

Agro, I'd say this one and Remains are the height of his form.

What I liked best about this book was the beginning. The interactions among all the kids at school were exquisitely drawn, especially Ruth: smug, uneasy, expertly keeping everyone off balance. Kathy's quiet flat voice was perfect.

I agree with you all that the society doesn't really hang together. I can believe that the clones themselves might accept their fate, but gaspode's right - what about the agitators?

Interesting imaginary time frame, too. It read a little like the early 70s, but for us that was ten years before Walkmans.

Maybe the time frame combined with the clones' passivity was meant to be a social commentary on that (pretty much our) generation? Or the previous one ("after the war") that created the clones/us?

i was thinking it was a different (imaginary) war, and not WW2 (but something in the 50s)--they were all born in the 60s. And Miss Emily had said it had been going on for a while before she got the idea to make it more humane, but it didn't seem like it was going on for decades, which would have made it WW2.

He said at the beginning it was the late 90s, and Kathy said she was 31, which would have made her born sometime bet. 65 and 69 (just a hair younger than me).

And also, there would have had to have been some kind of real desperate need for them to be created, like a nuclear kind of war, and massive depopulation or something--the country seemed empty and less populated, no? (or it was just that all the places they ever were were really isolated)

And i certainly got the impression it was a really massive program (of which Hailsham was just a tiny tiny part)--once they left, it seemed they were never the majority of people at the hospices/donation recovery places.

We don't even know if they were citizens, with rights or anything.

Altho the eugenics doctor thing made me kinda think that maybe it was an England where the Germans had won.

No matter what the background, though, I made sense of the book through the passivity. It wasn't a mistake, if he wanted someone to escape, he would have had them attempt it. The reader may want them to, but they don't consider it. Instead they dreamed of exemption. Gotta be a reason for that. I think it's the salient point. I don't know what that is, and wasn't really compelled enough to care, though.

I actually didn't sense a desperate need for their creation, like a nuclear disaster, and the landscape descriptions didn't indicate that. I got the sense it just naturally arose out of scientific pursuits, like it turned out to be easier than expected.