Sam S

Members
  • Content count

    1
  • Joined

  • Last visited

About Sam S

  • Rank
    Member
  1. I enjoyed Never Let Me Go, but I really want to echo what TychoCelchuuu said about it being a page-turner. It's a shame because when the book is quietly thinking about human relationships and mortality and everything else it really works, but it reads as if Ishiguro does not trust this to be enough to carry the book. NLMG is marred by these constant moments of prolepsis in which Kathy says something like '... but that was all changed by what happened next.' (For a specific example, my paperback has a moment on p. 211 where Kathy says 'But then everything changed again, and that was because of the boat.') The need for a plot is something I've been thinking a lot about since I played Firewatch. Giantbomb did an interview with Sean and Rich Sommer in which Sean said (I may be misremembering) something about needing a plot to interest players and make them want to see the human interactions. I have been going back and forth on how much I agree with this, and reading NLMG really has me convinced that it's not true. Whenever this book is Ruth sniping at Kathy or Tommy it's really amazing, but as soon as Ishiguro attempts to make it a page turner it just feels incredibly fake. That said, I do like a lot of things about this book. I find it interesting to consider it from the perspective of the traditional English public school narrative. Stories about English children going to boarding school are fairly common, and they often consider how parents are something of an absent presence, something that is missed but continues to exercise a sort of invisible authority over the children. Parents in NLMG are just a straight absence, and this is a really cool way of inverting a traditional story. Also, as others have touched upon, NLMG definitely has a thing or two to say about power's ability to limit the things one is actually capable of thinking and imagining, and I like how English boarding school narratives often treat parents as this invisible authority, while here it's something rather different.