Never Let Me Go

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Another book picked up in the collapse of Borders, another taken off the shelf to try and posh up my reading list, another arguably SF novel by a mainstream writer that seems to be trying to avoid genre associations, another that it's hard to discuss without massive spoilers. Which you might want to avoid, so stop now OK?
Sometimes a work contains such a big reveal that it can never be seen in the same light for a second time. Last year I watched Sixth Sense with a then girlfriend. She hated ghost stories, but (surely by now we all know the Sixth Sense twist?) because it wasn't presented as a ghost story she enjoyed it. At least up to the reveal. I doubt she would watch it again, even though it is one of those films that does reward a second watching, as the director's craft is so clear, as clue after clue is presented only to be ignored. The first time round anyhow.
Never Let Me Go strikes me as such a work, and with the recent film it's almost impossible to avoid the big reveal, but you can still appreciate the craft behind it.
Do we all know the big secret? Kids growing up in a slightly odd private school in the country, destined to be organ donors for the rich and powerful?
Within the book the talk is of Donations. A nice fluffy word. I have made 33 (blood) donations, but the young donors of Never Let Me Go make only four, presumably the Fourth Donation is the heart.
Its an engaging and powerful book. One of those ones that you read and wonder quite why it didn't win the Booker. Was the competition especially strong that year?
So. Organ donation. Altruistic in our world, murderous exploitation in theirs. But had you such a world, in which people accepted the morality of rearing clones like cattle, how to treat them?
Here they are educated, taught to be artists, encouraged to love, while subtly being taught that they are less than human, that their duty is to offer their bodies for their metters. Is that better than to just farm such people in concentration camps? While the characters wish for a 'deferment', they barely rail against their fate. Some even relish getting on with it.
Quite a thin book, but complex and challenging. Well worth reading. I don't have answers to any but it's most obvious questions. Is that just because the concept, of young people being raised and indoctrinated with the idea that it is their duty to give up their organs for others is just too alien?

Perhaps. But we still partially cling to the old lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori, at least as far as soldiers go. I can certainly believe the premise of the story that had we bumbled into a state where medical science made such things possible, we would fight tooth and nail to come up with reasons to imagine that the clones saving our lives were less than human, that our lives mattered more. God knows, otherwise respectable people said much the same thing about South Africa.
The oddity is that society is otherwise, apparently so mundane. It would be a very dull book if written about technocrats in floating skyscrapers exploiting an underclass, and probably that dull book has been written. But this isn't it, the questions are good, and I worry a bit that I don't have the answers.