Never Let Me Go?

[NotQuiteCockney]

Ok, I just sped through this, and sorta really liked it and sorta hated it.

I felt the metaphor stuff was just way too heavyhanded, and very depressing ...

Anyone else read this lately (hc)?

I thought it was brilliant, but really unsettling. It was the low-key way they talked about all these really horrific concepts that got to me.
Have you read Remains of the Day?

No, I've never read anything else by him. I'm tempted now, though.

It's interesting, though, people do talk about horrific things in quite low-key ways ...

He's dead fluent, isn't he. I felt it was an unexpectedly easy read, whizzing along comfortably with smooth writing. I can remember almost nothing of it except that (deliberately cinematic?) moment when the visiting doctor is horrified by the girl dancing with a pretend baby.

I thought Cloud Atlas did cloning a bit more interestingly.

I've quite liked the very odd one he (I mean Ishiguro, not David Mitchell) did about the musician (The Unconsoled) - it's about bad dreams, as I read it; and An Artist of the Floating World (one of his first) is very very good & he deserves his reputation as built on that.

I think he was raised in the UK, wasn't he?

I don't remember the cloning bit in Cloud Atlas ... oh, was it the far future bit with the restaurant? I read Cloud Atlas ages ago ... loved it.

I thought this one was really about normal life. We all are children, then work, then die. We do a lot of stuff as children that has no relevance to our later life, and a lot of stuff as adults that is irrelevant, really, too. (Like art.) And he's saying we do all this to distract ourselves from the fact we will die.

I actually felt the metaphorical thing was a bit too heavyhanded, though.

If it is a metaphor for death, why do the non-cloned react with horror?

It is very much like The Remains of the Day in the way the (horrific) Truth is slowly revealed to the reader, in a low-key way.

Because nobody likes to face death?

Well, also, the non-cloned are aware that the cloned exist for their benefit. I suspect I'd recoil from a lorry full of animals heading to the slaughterhouse, so I would say it's that ...