Fiction | Book Chatter

Never Let Me Go
By Kazuo Ishiguro
(Vintage, Paperback, 9781400078776, October 2010, 304pp.)

The Short of It:

Hauntingly sad, poetic and beautiful.

The Rest of It:

*No obvious spoilers.

The story opens with Kathy H., who has been a “carer” for over eleven years. As she tells her story, the reader is taken back in time to her years at Hailsham, a boarding school located in the English countryside where she was friends with Tommy and Ruth. There, they took classes on all sorts of subjects and were told over and over again by their guardians, that they were special.

Yes, they are special. Very special indeed. What the reader figures out pretty early on, is that these children have a special purpose. However, the children do not know exactly what that purpose is. They just know that they are special, and during their time at Hailsham, they are given information to help them understand that purpose, but not in plain words. Not in a way that they would easily understand.

The school experience is like what you’d expect. There are cliques and teachers who test the administration with their actions. Although Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are very close friends, they have their moments, too. As they grow, they begin to realize their purpose and the dawning realization of what they are, creates tension in ways they are not often prepared to deal with.

This entire story is peppered with clinical aspects. Hailsham is very hospital-like and lab tests are the norm. Since these children really don’t know of a life different from their own, they are somewhat happy yet deep down, they yearn for something more. They just don’t know what.

In one sense, Ishiguro’s delivery is cold as ice. Everyone possesses an aloofness that is slightly off-putting. But, there is a tenderness…a softness to the characters that will make your heart ache. These characters yearn for what they don’t have, yet they have resigned themselves to the lives they’ve been given. They will never really love, because to do so, would mean losing it in the end. They can never have children, or get married or live to a ripe, old age. What they have, is the pleasure of knowing that they’ve lived their life for a purpose.

This book reminded me a lot of The Unit, which has the same premise but uses adults instead of children. In a lot of ways, this book was harder to swallow because it dealt with children, yet Ishiguro handles the topic expertly and I found myself thinking about these characters many days after finishing the book. Its coldness melted away and became profoundly touching.

I haven’t seen the movie, but now I really want to. You can view the movie trailer here.

Source: Borrowed

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

The Map of Time
By Felix J. Palma
(Atria Books, Hardcover, 9781439167397, June 2011, 624pp.)

The Short of It:

Victorian goodness with some sci-fi and mystery thrown in for good measure.

The Rest of It:

First, a bit about the story itself. Andrew Harrington has fallen in love with a prostitute by the name of Marie Kelly. Andrew comes from money, so falling in love with a working girl was not what his father had in mind. Nevertheless, he falls hard for her. Unfortunately, she is Jack the Ripper’s 5th victim and Andrew arrives too late to save her. Staggering away from the murder scene, he is stricken over what’s happened and plagued by his inability to save her.

Eight years later and influenced by books such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, he decides to travel back in time to change Marie’s fate. What follows is a genre-bender like no other.

This book is either brilliant, or a total sham! At 624 pages, it starts off innocently enough, but then by the end of book one, it takes a completely different turn and then heads into the future with a new set of players. Although the story seems to shift underneath you, it’s clear that Palma has something up his sleeve and that the stories are in fact connected in some way.

This book is far from predictable. Every time I turned the page I pondered what just happened. Not because it was confusing in any way, but because I could not imagine how the author kept it all straight while writing the story. There are trips to the past, trips to the future, trips to parallel universes, there’s a murder (actually more than one), thuggery (I came up with that term), fraud, a budding romance…okay, more than one and appearances by all sorts of folks including: The Elephant Man, Henry James, Bram Stoker and H.G. Wells himself.

When I say that this book was a wild ride through time… I am not kidding. It was an adventure and from those very first pages, I found myself hooked. Mainly because I HAD to know how it ended, plus I love Victorian London and sci-fi. However, by the end of the book I was left with my mouth gaping open. I read this with another blogger and we were both either incredibly impressed or royally ticked. We weren’t sure. I’m still not sure.

If you like the elements I mentioned, enjoy a genre-bender every now and then, and don’t mind being pulled through a lot of different subplots to partake in the adventure, then you’ll love this book. After spending some time thinking about it, I am leaning more toward it being brilliant, but it’s was a slow realization for me.

Note from Ti: The hardcover edition is GORGEOUS! The cover is partially matte, partially glossy which you can’t tell from the image. It also includes end papers depicting the Map of Time itself. It’s all very well done.

Source: Sent to me by the publisher.