"Never Let Me Go"

I just finished the book "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro today. Listening to it on CD, that is, which is how I keep myself sane while attempting to do my job. This is one of my random picks from the library. I am using Simply Audio bookclub for best sellers, familiar authors that I enjoy, but our library has a different sort of selection. There are some best sellers....but a lot of other stuff that I might not normally pick. And that has actually been a good thing. I have found some amazing reads (listens, I mean) that way. "Never Let Me Go" is one of those.

Its a story about a group of children who grow up in a boarding school academy. They are clones, created for the sole purpose of donating body parts to save lives when they come of age. The narrator of the story is Kathy, who tells it from vantage point of a 31 year old woman....but relives her history at the Hailsham academy. It is something I wouldn't generally attempt to read. Clones bespeaks of science fiction which is just not my thing. But its not a cold, science fiction story of clones battling to take over middle earth or whatever (really, I have NO idea what any of that means). Its a poignant story of a young woman coming to terms with who and what she is. Its brutal but not graphic. And I became so thoroughly engrossed in it, in the plight of the main characters....so emotionally entangled in all of it, that I was weeping by the end. Seriously. Crying like I had lost someone very close to me. I won't tell anything to give the plot away, just in case. And to my surprise, it was made into a movie in 2010. I have never heard of it, but now I do want to see it. Keira Knightly is in it, so it must have been a fairly big production. How did I miss that? Or did I hear "clones" and think science fiction??? I have no idea.

I kept finding metaphors for our non-clone lives. Conditioning to accept the unacceptable for instance. And more, but I can't give examples without divulging the plot, so I will leave it at that. I found it completely wonderful, and sad, and thought provoking. I'm glad I picked it up randomly out of the racks and racks of books on CD's. Sometimes I pick a winner...sometimes not. I generally give a book 2 discs worth of my time. If it doesn't pique my interest by the end of disc 2, then back it goes. There has only been a few that I just couldn't get in to.

"And these children that you spit on, as they try to change their worlds,
Are immune to your consultations. They are quite aware of what they are going through."
David Bowie

Funny how this song came on just after the book ended, and that quote seemed pertinent somehow....through my tears. LOL.