Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

From the cover of the book, I had a vague idea that it would be a literary, people- and relationship-based novel - which it is - maybe like Atonement. Which it is not. I suspect my mind remembered the last book I read with a picture of Keira Knightley on the front cover. I also expected some kind of hint at ghostly goings-on, because the picture of Knightley at the top made me think of Cathy Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights.

What I actually got was something very different - and if you want to read this book open-mindedly, I suggest you don't read past this paragraph - and whatever you do, avoid watching the movie trailers. I'm avoiding plot spoilers but will be making reference to genre and writing style. The short version of the review is: "This book is great, read that instead of the blog."

Potential spoilers below

The first thing Ishiguro tells us is that the setting is "England, late 1990s," and we meet our narrator, Kathy, who tells us a little about her position working as a carer, before sending us back in time to her childhood at Hailsham school. From the very beginning, subtle uses of language alert us to the suspicion that this is not quite the world as we know it. "Carer" doesn't seem to mean quite what we expect it to, and when Kathy describes her school life, the adults are described not as "teachers" but "guardians." A seemingly insignificant choice of word, that could just be a school breaking the trends, but nothing in Never Let Me Go is accidental. Similarly, the emphasis on what is considered important or not is ever so slightly off-kilter, such as the urgency for Hailsham students to be "creative," and the worry when one seems to have no artistic talents. Clearly Hailsham is preparing its students for something - but what?


When the "big reveal" comes, to be honest it's not much of a shock. Superficially it might seem that Ishiguro has been clumsy, leaving too many clues in the text so that that the plot twist isn't as dramatic as it should be. I realised that this, too, is no accident. Miss Lucy, the guardian who blurts out exactly what the students' future holds, tells them that they've been "told and not told," and Tommy expands on this, hypothesising that "the guardians had [...] timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand the latest piece of information. But of course we'd take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly." Like the students, when I read this book there was no one moment of realisation. When Miss Lucy made her outburst, I just realised that I'd known all along. A very, very clever piece of writing.


Alongside the "knowing all along," was a sort of anaesthetising of the horror. The narration is simple, unflowery, and very matter-of-fact. Where apparently insignificant events are elevated to importance, the destiny of Kathy, Ruth, Tommy and other students should be shocking and horrific, but the characters' unquestioning acceptance that this is just the way the world is, makes for a chillingly calm read. Never Let Me Go had a slow-burning effect on me, its impact increasing after I'd finished reading and carried on thinking about it. I was very glad not to have seen the film trailer before reading the book as it gives far too much away and would have spoiled the book, not only in plot details but in its genre and literary qualities.

I'm looking forward to seeing the film in February and would be interested in reading more of Ishiguro's work.

Room, Emma Donoghue

It's Jack's birthday, and he's excited about turning five. He lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real - only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside...

Told through the eyes of a five-year-old boy, at first Room seems to be a quirky family story about a family of mother and son. Their world is tiny, but to Jack, that's the way the world is. There's real, which is Room and everything in it, and then there's TV.

And then there's Old Nick, who is not Room and not TV. Upon the introduction of Old Nick, the perspective shifts and we discover what Jack hasn't realised: Room is a prison, and Ma is a young girl abducted and held captive in a soundproof shed. Once you realise this, you can't help but think of these real-life cases reported on the news that once uncovered were impossible to avoid, splashed all over the papers, monstrous crimes that must be exposed, and at the same time you step back to try to grant the victims privacy. With such subject matter, Room could so easily be unreadable, with an author trying to imagine the unimagineable, fictionalising a scenario that to its survivors were all too real for so many years, making the book feel intrusive or simply downright depressing. Donoghue manages to avoid this trap by using Jack, not Ma, as the protagonist, and for whom there is nothing sensational about his lifestyle - this is just the world.

Jack is a very bright child, yet he is only a child and he can only describe the world as he sees it. Through his limited vocabulary, describing what to him are the mundane realities of life, we get to understand the true horror Ma is concealing from him. As they plan their Great Escape I found myself getting very frustrated with Jack for his reluctance to leave and then his homesickness for Room and for saying or doing things that upset Ma, his mother who has been through so much trauma trying to protect him. But he is only five and this is the only world he knows.

The driving force of Room which keeps it from being morbid or mawkish is the love Ma has for her son, and her courage in trying to bring him up to the best of her ability, making a routine and refusing to give up. Perhaps in places the story seems to be too easily resolved, but you know it will never be easy for Ma and Jack to adjust to the outside world - a world which until a few weeks ago Jack didn't even know existed. Jack is still young, still learning, but I suspected it would take a long time for Ma to recover from seven years of imprisonment. Her love for Jack is consistantly shown to be the thing that helped her survive.

The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters

When you read a lot of books, it is inevitable that many of them leave you disappointed. Occasionally, however, a book comes along that is close to perfect. I found that two years ago, unexpectedly, when I reached the end of A Tale of Two Cities. At the beginning of last year, Markus Zusak's The Book Thief left me speechless. And a few weeks ago, I discovered The Little Stranger (which has now been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, and I will be disappointed if it doesn't win.)

The Little Stranger is a ghost story of sorts, set just after the end of the Second World War, in Hundreds Hall, an old house whose family are losing control of it. The Ayres family have the house, but not the money to run it, and strange phenomena start occurring. The narrator is one Doctor Faraday, the son of one of the former maids at Hundreds who becomes friends with the family. As he becomes more intimate with the Ayres family: the widowed Mrs Ayres, her son Roderick and daughter Caroline.

The novel reads as though it were written at the time in which it is set. Waters not only uses the vocabulary of the era, but stylistic conventions. For example certain words are not spelled out, but contain dashes. Similarly, when characters mention a recent scandal, the name is omitted.

The central character in The Little Stranger is not Doctor Faraday, or any one of the Ayres family, but Hundreds Hall itself, which takes its place in a long line of old crumbling houses in the Gothic tradition, from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Stephen King's Overlook Hotel. The atmosphere of the house begins as one of shabby nostalgia, a sorry memory of grander times. Waters skillfully evolves that atmosphere, through one of intrigue as Roderick starts to think that there is something wrong with the house. At first the signs are petty, seemingly harmless, such as furniture moving, and corresponding marks. These uncanny occurrences become more malevolent and when Dr Faraday notices dark marks all over the walls of Roderick's bedroom, spreading like mildew, like the "infection" Roderick feared. A creeping terror came over me as I read of those marks, which I knew corresponded with something terrible that would happen.

Sarah Waters never fully explains the "ghost," if ghost it is. Doctor Faraday, a man of science, stubbornly resists, in the face of evidence, that there is anything supernatural taking place at Hundreds Hall, and there is no moment of realisation. Traditionally in Gothic fiction, if the narrator is a scientist or a doctor, it is to add veracity to the tale - but Dr Faraday refuses to see what does not fit into his understanding. Waters through other characters suggests identities or explanations - Mrs Faraday believes the ghost of her late daughter Susan to be haunting her old house, and some of the clues seem to point to that, but others make no sense at all. Other characters suggest Roderick to be "haunting" Hundreds, or Caroline's repressed feelings. But Waters never gives an explanation. I started the novel wanting to know the answers, but when I reached the end I realised that a definite answer would be inevitably disappointing, while an open ending leaves the reader to come to their own conclusions, if they want to. Besides, I could not imagine a moment of realisation coming to Faraday - it would not fit with the novel or the character, and would be too tidy. Is "the little stranger" a straightforward ghost? Is it, like Poe's House of Usher, the house and the family, the one inextricable from the other? Is it some force influenced by one, or more, of the characters?

I read an interesting blog article by someone who goes by the name of "The Little Professor"  which suggests that the "Little Stranger" is Faraday himself. This was a possibility I had considered myself on reading the novel. After all, everything starts after Faraday starts spending time at Hundreds, and the idea of living at the Hall and restoring it to its former glory becomes an obsession with him - he becomes engaged to Caroline, but his love for her is unconvincing. It's the house he wants, not her.