Silence Slaughter
Sorry for jumping on the bandwagon late. I just finished the book “Never Let Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro, which was published in 2005 and, probably, had long passed its prime time for discussion, either praising or criticizing.
I won’t say anything new if I add my voice to the crowd of readers who asked the author the same question that bothered me the whole book. “Why are there no rebellion, revolution, uprising, not even a single thought about escaping the publicly-opened slaughter of human donors?”
Dystopian fiction usually gives its characters an arc of awakening: Winston Smith rebels (1984), however doomed. Katniss Everdeen volunteers (that’s why we love Hunger Games). The “Red Rising” series gives us 6 volumes of bloody war and rebellion on Mars and beyond it. Every beloved character from popular books fights to survive and find justice.
Ishiguro withholds that arc entirely, and his characters are just doomed to “complete,” aka give away their organs for free. The main character, Kathy, narrates her own life in the same measured, almost domestic tone she’d use to describe a school trip, and she applies that tone to her friends’ deaths as well. The horror sits precisely in the missing gap between what the system does to these people and what they do about it — which is nothing.
This is also where the book’s real cruelty lies — in the quiet despair that no one ever questions changing their destiny. The three main characters learn about their fate gradually, in fragments. And once they know, they don’t fight it. They don’t rebel or try to change the inevitable. They don’t run away, even though they have cars and money. They arrange their lives, fall in love, argue over small betrayals, and walk, one by one, toward the operating table.
And that is the real shock of the futuristic society.
Kudos to Ishiguro; the silence works.
At first, I joined the chorus of angry readers who accused the author of making a monstrous premise a casual thing without the slightest hope. But later I understood that precisely the absence of rebellion is the real horror of the society that created that perfect system to have that convenient walking and breathing container for society’s future health problems. There is no real villain to defeat. There is only a slow, decent-seeming system that raised those children to serve, and the acceptance of the violence as a public norm.
The book left me unsettled and upset, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks. But isn’t it a dream of every author that your book will be remembered and pondered long after the reader closes it?