Kathy, the narrator, is a clone.
She was created to die being a donor of her own internal organs to those who
wish to live longer lives. A whole class of such clones is posited by this
novel, as Kathy reminisces about her childhood growing up in a boarding school in
the British countryside. Ordinary people recoil from the clones, yet everything
about Kathy’s narration shows her to be intelligent and extraordinarily kind.
In this book, the clones have
souls and fall in love just as the rest of humanity does. Kathy and her lover
Tommy wish to defer for three or four years the onset of the medical operations
that will eventually kill them, but there is nary one shout or one tear when
they learn this is not possible. This, I think, is the author’s point. The docile
victims do not seem to be aware that the whole system is unethical and
horrific, and so they make no protest.
Kazuo Ishiguro is perhaps best known for Remains of the Day, another work that takes as its subject social inequality.
No comments:
Post a Comment