This is a beautifully subtle work of science fiction (though marketed at a literary fiction audience, most likely because of Ishiguro’s past works such as Remains of the Day). It centres on a group of children being raised in some sort of institution for purposes the reader is only very gradually made aware of.
It’s subtle both in developing the mystery of the identity of the group of children, the nature of the institution, and the importance of the drawings their teachers want from them, and in portraying the characters with a few lines of dialogue and an exchange of glances.
I do love a book that lets you work things out for yourself, and I don’t want to say too much more about the plot because of how much of the beauty of this book is contained within working it out.
Though the subjects are very different, it felt similar to me to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, because of the way the alternate future/present society is layered into the main story without being overly spelled-out, and for the underlying sense of melancholy and gentle menace.
More about the author here.
Never Let Me Go really is an amazing book. I definitely get the similarity to Atwood – the feeling of a world that’s grown naturally from what we know today, rather than a giant leap of future shock. They both also take technological change as a given, rather than something that should have the hows and whys spelled out.
It’s a technique I really like: it’s not like books set in current times go on and on about the technology the characters are using, so it’s realistic that the same attitude would apply in books set in the future. It takes quite a bit of restraint (and resistance from lazy readers) to not spell it out.
[...] really like Ishiguro’s works, though I haven’t read them all (I haven’t got to his two earliest works, or his [...]