death – Only Mostly Dead

Well the awesome power of RED means I’ve finished another book that I’ve previously stalled on, which is obviously a good thing.

The Book Thief is a novel narrated by Death and tells the story of a young girl, Liesel Meminger growing up in war-time Germany. As the story begins she’s taken to live with foster parents as her mother can no longer cope and her ill younger brother dies on the way there. We follow Liesel, her best friend Rudy and her new Papa and Mama as she learns to read, to love books and grows up. Her new family are poor and not exactly sympathetic to the Nazi regime they’re living under, so life is hard I guess, though through the eyes of a child this is just the way the world is.

This was a weird one for me. At any individual point when I was reading it I was aware of how well it was written. The characters are vibrant and engaging, colourful and alive. The use of language is clever and playful. And yet I really had to push myself to finish it. I had a sense of plodding through it. Partly I think this was because the story exists as a series of anecdotes about a girl growing up, and whilst some of these are major events and part of a bigger story – both in terms of what was going on in the world but also in terms of her life – a lot are just little incidents that illustrate what that life was like – hard, joyous, confusing, exciting and so on. I suppose after about half way through the book I wanted more of just “the story” and less of the illustration.

I would recommend this book though because I do think it is well written and it has the power to move you. It’s light in places but not a light read. I was just thinking that you could write the same story without the need for Death to take a role as an actual character, but then I think he’s there to underline a point.

7/10 – A well-written book that may be a tough read for some, but worth it I think.

So that was 7 books in January, well ahead of schedule. I’ve stalled a little in that I haven’t read very much in the 4 days since I finished it – a paltry 14 pages. I guess that makes it nice that I’ve got a bit of a lead on the target. I was aware when I started this new regime (and remember I started unofficially back in November) that the possibility existed to ‘burn out’ by reading too much too quickly and then just needing a break. I am still wary of that – I’d rather read 50 pages a day every day than hit 50+books but have weeks off at a time. Well I say that but it’s nice to feel like I’m doing well at something…

OK, first of all, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t really want to know anything about a book before you read it, the kind of person who won’t watch trailers of movies in case they give too much away, then you should really skip this review. Not that I’m planning to ruin the book, I won’t give away the ending, but I can’t sensibly talk about it without talking about the central premise.

Still with me? Good.

Never Let Me Go is a kind of SciFi novel in that it’s set in a world almost exactly like ours but with one difference i.e. it’s an alternative present. Still I say only “kind of SciFi” because although good SciFi is always more interested in ideas than shiny tech, this really isn’t interested in tech at all except in how it changes society. In that way it reminds me of something like Children of Men.

Kathy and her friends Tommy and Ruth grew up in a boarding school called Hailsham. There they are prepared for the life that is ahead of them and we soon see that this is not quite the kind of life one might expect. Nevertheless they have a close relationship and the early part of the book is about their experiences together, their loves and aspirations and conflicts within the relatively small world of the school. There’s an intensity here that may relate to their role in the world or may just be a consequence of that enclosed environment.

We follow them as they grow into adulthood, learning some measure of independence but always with an eye towards a particular future. You see these are human clones who have been bred for the specific purpose of providing organ donations. They live relatively normal but short lives, “completing” once they have made 2,3 or at most 4 donations. Some of them, Kathy in this story, work as “carers” to the “donors” supporting them through the medical procedures. But even the carers eventually become donors themselves.

This is a thoughtful intense book. I enjoyed it for the most part. One annoying habit the author has is in the early part of the book he tells various incidents out of order. Nothing wrong with that per se but the way he does it appears to have no real reason. He’ll be telling you about an incident between two characters and at the end he’ll say something like “…but maybe that’s because of what had happened with the tape.” Then he’ll go back and tell the story of the tape ending it with “…which is perhaps why she fell out so strongly with Tommy.” Then he’ll skip forward and tell you about the argument with Tommy. He’ll do this several times in a row and it left my head slightly spinning and I couldn’t think of a good reason why he couldn’t just describe events in the order they occurred.

The other reservation I have is about why the characters don’t try harder to escape their fate – to run away or rebel. I know the answer but it’s not one given in the story itself. Remember I said this was a kind of SciFi? One of the things that SciFi often prompts people to do is ask “why?” questions – “Why don’t they just use the transporter to beam out of there?”. Often there’s a reasonable answer that the author has alluded to but not gone into detail on because he doesn’t want to distract from the story itself. I’ve been a defender of this kind of story-telling. It’s about suspension of disbelief. You accept certain things to allow the story to be what it is.

Well anyway, this is similar to that but the answer to the “why?” question is “because this is a metaphor” and for the metaphor to work the donors need to be accepting of their future. Why don’t I let Ishiguro himself, talking when the film of the book was released, explain:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jCB59pPG7k&NR=1]

So as a meditation on the meaning of life, its brevity and inevitable end, the book does have some interesting things to say. I confess to being just picky enough to be bothered by the “why?” question. I can extrapolate from hints in the text that it’s because they’ve been socialised their whole lives to be compliant, but still…

7/10 – A thoughtful, challenging book.