By Kazuo Ishiguro
I read this in August 2024, in India, over two or three days - I bought it in a Crossword.
Devastatingly good. I’m writing this a week or so after I finished it, after a hallucinatory fever, so it’s a bit hazy, but the lingering impression is of a tender and painfully accurate depiction of childhood and relationships that last for decades.
One trick I particularly liked is the introduction of the kids’ identities and what they are born for - the narrator, Kathy, says that they were introduced to it so slowly and well that it was as if they’d always known everything, and nothing was a shock. Ishiguro pulled the same trick off with the reader, introducing stuff and dropping hints in such a way that the ideas never needed to be spelt out, but it was as if we’d always known.
There was a genuine love for the characters throughout, even the enemies of our protagonists. The skips forwards and backwards in time showed in jarring contrast the childhood and adult versions of the characters: the warm protection of Hailsham and the Cottages, followed by the bleakness and apathy of their later lives. Just gorgeous.
Sometimes the tackling of the main idea, that they have been raised to donate organs, was underdone - after all, it’s not a sci-fi movie - but sometimes the lack of treatment made me wonder what the point of including it at all was. Perhaps it was just meant to represent the apathy of nature and the cruelty of life as a backdrop to everything, but if that’s the case it wasn’t treated as well as it could have been. But that wasn’t the strength of the book anyway.
Overall, immersive and touching and dark.