The thing I really disliked was the utterly bleak vision, not of the future (although that’s pretty darn bleak – but not as bleak as The Road) but of human nature. The setting is fairly interesting if a little ‘cookie-cutter’ and there’s a slight sense of Atwood reinventing the wheel, given that she doesn’t consider herself a speculative fiction writer (and yet this is comfortably something we’d call a speculative novel). It was a bit slow moving for a post-apocalyptic novel, but the three main characters, Snowman, Crake and Oryx are interesting and well realised. I wanted to like this book, and in some ways, I did. What follows are some miniature (read: half-hearted) reviews of all three. Hell, I might even try Gravity’s Rainbow. Hence the next cab off the rank is going to be Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which I just was never going to get around to. Normally I have a hard time getting through books that are longer than about 350 pages in length, but on the long drives I actually prefer having something meaty that will last me a while. Three novels that I’ve managed to get through so far are Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Larry Brown’s Fay. These novels were chosen mainly because they a) are among the 200+ titles I own in hard copy and haven’t read and b) an audiobook version was available. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.About a month ago I started a new job that involves a hell of a lot of driving, so I thought I’d invest in a cheap mp3 player and some audiobooks.
It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city.
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