Category: Review

By Brenna English-Loeb

Senior Writer

Booker Prize Winner Kazuo Ishiguro (for his 1989 “The Remains of the Day“) has come to the fore of the literary scene once more with his striking “Never Let Me Go.” Ishiguro’s delicate, precise prose is again at work with his trademark style of novels based on reminiscence. The memories of Kathy H. flow from one scene to another practically seamlessly, transporting the reader through her short life, each scene raising just as many questions as it answers about Kathy’s strange world. “Never Let Me Go” moves along so swiftly, readers will be totally engrossed and wish to finish the novel in one sitting.

It is hard to give even a brief account of “Never Let Me Go” without giving away one of the novel’s integral conditions, but the slow realization of this specific plot point is part of what makes the work so masterful. Kathy H. tells the dreamlike and somewhat disjointed story of her youth growing up at Hailsham, a boarding school-esque establishment in England in the 90s. She has two very important friends from Hailsham, Ruth and Tommy, who grow together and learn to navigate harsh realities of their situation. The unsettling conceit is that Kathy, Ruth and Tommy’s experience of the world is not quite like ours, though it is parallel to it.

The characters of the three protagonists are revealed in poignant episodes without being obviously sentimental. There are several influential teachers at Hailsham, notably Miss Lucy and Miss Emily, who have a somewhat ambivalent role in the protagonists‘ lives and yet also remain sympathetic.

Part of Ishiguro’s success with his characterization stems from the solid background of this parallel world he has created. Every detail is specific and meaningful, full of a personal lore deeply entrenched in his main character’s personality. Sometimes, due to the limitations brought on by the first person narrative, the reader can wish for more concrete information rather than passing remarks.The world Ishiguro has created is clearly a rich one, but somehow it remains outside the complete grasp of the reader’s comprehension, somewhat frustratingly mirroring Kathy’s own incomplete understanding.

Ishiguro does not weigh down his prose with pages of exposition, which greatly aids the novel’s flow.Ishiguro successfully avoids the pitfalls of many dystopian novels where characters improbably attempt to lead a cultural revolution. Kathy, Ruth and Tommy do not try to do any such thing. They just try to live.

“Never Let Me Go” has recently been adapted into a movie, directed by Mark Romanek and starring Carey Mulligan as Kathy, Keira Knightley as Ruth and Andrew Garfield as Tommy.

By Catherine McClelland

Senior Writer

There has always been literature and pulp: Tolstoy vs. James Patterson, Dante vs. Danielle Steele and perhaps Oprah’s book club balanced precariously somewhere in the middle. Each side of the great literary divide takes a certain pride in disparaging the other. Shakespeare is dismissed as stuffy. The bestseller shelves are slammed for trashiness.

Neither academia nor the pulp authors seem interested in bridging the divide, and in the age of mega-publishing it seems neither are the booksellers. David Mitchell’s 2004 novel “Cloud Atlas” aims to change that.

In the tradition of Shakespeare, “Cloud Atlas” aims to be entertainment as well as art. Mitchell plays in all sorts of genres—the novel’s six stories span a southern-seas drama, a scenic ars poetica,a conspiracy thriller, an absurdist adventure, a sci-fi dystopia and a post-apocalyptic story.

Rather than being boxed in by the conventions he uses, Mitchell always introduces a twist to break the genres’clichés. During an interview with the Paris Review he explained how he experiments with writing genre fiction as literary art: “When something is two-dimensional, here’s how to fix it: Identify an improbable opposite and mix it plausibly [into the story].”

What results is fiction that feels both familiar and strange. Every time the reader anticipates the plot, a surprise is around the corner. The characters are full of individual quirks but also come together into a coherent portrait of humankind. Mitchell’s strongest talent is his flair for writing memorable voices, slipping into a different vocabulary in every novella so that each protagonist stays in the reader’s head days after putting the book down. Every page is a testament to the author’s artistic bravado—and not only that, it’s clever, exciting and genuinely funny.

The novel’s most surprising element is its unorthodox structure. Each of the six novellas is split in half to form a frame around the following story. Mitchell chooses to structure the story like a set of Russian nesting dolls. Each novella is cut off in the middle of the action and the next one begins immediately. After the sixth, unbroken novella, the novel returns to finish the fifth novella, then the fourth, so that the whole novel is structured symmetrically.

To balance this structure, the six stories are interconnected. The musician protagonist of the second novella reads the seafarer’s diary of the first novella. The musician’s letters are then read by the journalist Luisa Rey in the mystery-thriller novella, which becomes a manuscript submitted in the fourth novella to publisher Timothy Cavendish, whose autobiography is turned into a film that the prisoner of the fifth novella requests to watch after her interrogation, with the interrogation’s footage found by the members of the final novella.

Each of the six stories deals with a different constellation of themes, but the novel’s common thread is power and suffering. The novel is full of seemingly disconnected characters—gunslingers, pirates, scientists, assassins, homosexuals, slaves and musicians—who unite to tell us about ourselves, how humankind never changes from generation to generation and how the world can be startlingly beautiful even in its saddest moments.

Rating: 5/5