In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [69]
What is art for? the characters ask. They link the question to their own circumstances, but surely they speak for anyone with a connection with the arts: What is art for? The notion that it ought to be for something, that it must serve some clear social purpose—extolling the gods, cheering people up, illustrating moral lessons—has been around at least since Plato, and was tyrannical in the nineteenth century. It lingers with us still, especially when parents and teachers start squabbling over school curricula. Art does turn out to have a purpose in Never Let Me Go, but it isn’t quite the purpose the characters have been hoping for.
One motif at the very core of Never Let Me Go is the treatment of out-groups, and the way out-groups form in-groups, even among themselves. The marginalized are not exempt from doing their own marginalization: even as they die, Ruth and Tommy and the other donors form a proud, cruel little clique, excluding Kathy H. because, not being a donor yet, she can’t really understand.
The book is also about our tendency to cannibalize others to make sure we ourselves get a soft ride. Ursula K. Le Guin has a short story called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” in which the happiness of the many depends absolutely on the arranged unhappiness of the few, and Never Let Me Go could be read as a sister text. The children of Hailsham are human sacrifices, offered up on the altar of improved health for the population at large. With babies already being created with a view to their organs—help for an afflicted sibling, for instance—the dilemma of the Hailsham “students” is bound to become more general. Who owns your body? Who therefore is entitled to offer it up? The reluctance of Kathy H. and her pals to really confront what awaits them—pain, mutilation, death—may account for the curious lack of physicality of Kathy’s descriptions of their life. Nobody eats anything much in this book, nobody smells anything. We don’t know much about what the main characters look like. Even the sex is oddly bloodless. But landscapes, buildings, and the weather are intensely present. It’s as if Kathy has invested a lot of her sense of self in things quite far away from her own body, and thus less likely to be injured.
Finally, the book is also about our wish to do well, to attract approval. The children’s poignant desire to be patted on the head—to be a “good carer,” keeping those from whom organs are being taken from becoming too distressed; to be a “good donor,” someone who makes it through all four “donations”—is heartbreaking. This is what traps them in their cage: none of them thinks about running away or revenging themselves upon the “normal” members of society. Ruth takes refuge in grandiose lies about herself, and in daydreams—maybe she’ll be allowed to get an office job. Tommy reacts with occasional rage to the unconscionable things being done to him but then apologizes for his loss of control. In Ishiguro’s world, as in our own, most people do what they’re told.
Tellingly, two words recur again and again. One, as you might expect, is normal. The other is supposed, as in the last words of the book: “wherever it was that I was supposed to be going.” Who defines “normal”? Who tells us what we are supposed to be doing? These questions always become more pressing in times of stress; unless I’m much mistaken, they’ll loom ever larger in the next few years.
Never Let Me Go is unlikely to be everybody’s cup of tea. The people in it aren’t heroic. The ending is not comforting. Nevertheless, this is a brilliantly executed book by a master craftsman who has chosen a difficult subject: ourselves, seen through a glass, darkly.
After the Last Battle:
Visa for Avalon
by Bryher
The novella-length fiction Visa for Avalon by the writer who called herself Bryher was first published in 1965 and was reissued by the Paris Press in 2004, before the U.S. presidential election