never let me go. speculative fact??

In Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro does such a brilliant job with first person narration – realistic, casual, conversationalist – that he completely lulls the reader into a false sense of something. Not security, necessarily, but something.

And that false sense of something is more telling than the story itself. It’s Ishiguru’s genius. His ability to keep our guard down while forcing us to draw frightening parallels between an abstract world we abhor and would never conceivably allow, and our own.

It’s a novel. Fiction. We’re meant to suspend belief. To settle into the story. But what happens when we become too relaxed. When all that relaxing bleeds over into our every day lives. And we stop doing anything else because settling and accepting becomes the easier option?

Of course it couldn’t happen. We’d never start treating people like they weren’t people anymore…certainly not because someone in authority told us to. Or because a talking head tried to cloak it in some kind of virtuous. Something as profound as humanity could never really fall into question.

Never mind history. Never mind the holocaust. Never mind the genocide that’s taking place right now. All over the world. (See where I’m going with this?)

Never Let Me Go is the kind of book that gets your gears going. A bit of Brave New World for a not so brave world to think about.

Good stuff. Read it. You’ll enjoy.