Have heard people criticize the initial chapters, devoted to the adolescent affairs of three students attending Halesham Academy, a seemingly idyllic British boarding school, as simplistic and slow. Overlooking the important character development that is occurring, the sheer ordinariness of these chapters is critical to Ishiguro's purpose. In a world where clones are seen as commodities, it's critical for Ishiguro to establish that these characters are fully-realized adolescents suffering all the familiar milestones of adolescence: insecurity, bullying, young love. It's also necessary for him to regularize his readers to a world in which organ harvesting from clones isn't just permitted, but unchallenged.
In many ways this book reminded me of the author's Remains of the Day. Both books feature protagonists who have accepted, without questioning, the societal/cultural expectations foisted upon them, whose inability to communicate jeopardizes their hope of personal happiness, and who come to appreciate, too late, the price they have paid for their compliance. Questions this novel poses: To what extent do the needs of the many offset the rights of the few? To what extent is it realistic to expect socially and psychologically marginalized populations to assert agency over their fates? Can palliative thoughtfulness offset the guilt of prescribed cruelty? I'm reminded of "humane cattle chutes" - does concealing the killing machines from cows until the last minute somehow absolve us of blame for turning them into hamburgers?
A heads up for anyone who hasn't yet read the book: this is a story told not through hyperbole or hit-you-over-the-head-irony, but through micro-expressions and peripheral vision. If you want to appreciate the subtlety of Ishiguro's craft, don't let yourself be so distracted by what's going on the foreground that you lose track of what's happening in the background. And be sure to leave some time after you're done to let the implications of this "deceptively simple" fable sink in.
