Apu’s World

Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ for the tenth time, I am struck by the quietness of the book. This is not a book with verbal fireworks. The language is extremely simple and easy to follow, like most Ishiguro novels. The narrator is seemingly just narrating a story, her story. Yet, it all comes together to create a work that keeps me totally engrossed, and every time I read it, I feel such sorrow.

(Some spoilers ahead…)

Beyond the story however, in terms of technique, I find two things incredible - one, Ishiguro sets a fantasy in this world, in this time. Most fantasy novels are set either in a different time (like Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, in a medieval world) or a completely different place (Middle Earth or Narnia). I think it’s very brave of him to set a fantasy novel in a completely recognisable time and setting. The danger is that we can identify so well with the time and place, that the fantasy may seem absurd, this doesn’t happen where I live - a sort of reluctance to suspend disbelief.

But, somehow, this doesn’t happen with Never Let Me Go. Even in a familiar setting like modern day Britain, he manages to create an alternate reality. This is accomplished by creating a world within a world - in a sense, the main characters all inhabit a different universe which interacts only peripherally with the ‘normal’ world. Clones, created genetically to serve only as organ donors for the rest of the world, Ishiguro manages to give them their own landscape.

And this is the second amazing thing - this world has its own codes and rules and seemingly normal interactions. All the time I’m reading the novel, they seem like perfectly normal people and then suddenly, Ishiguro will thrown in a quiet word about “completing”, which jolts me back into thinking Oh my God, he means they’re dying, isn’t it! So, at the same time, their world manages to be both ‘normal’ and ‘different’, which is perhaps why we can believe it - it’s so much like ours- and yet we are awed by it - it’s not like ours at all, it feels like another planet! That’s how perhaps he reconciles us to strange happenings in a familiar world. It’s close enough to trust and feel sorrow, strange enough to generate interest and fear.

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