never let me go

I'd originally started to write this post a few months ago when the Kazuo Ishiguro story called 'Never Let Me Go' was running as a movie on television. I read the novel quite a long time ago but only saw the (similar) movie recently, and then watched it again on Monday as it's flittering around again on Sky.

I think when it was first on movie release it didn't get such good reviews from the critics. Contrastingly, I found its slower pace and surprisingly accepting attitudes of the main players made for quite an interesting thought piece. The main character behaviours are just not as one might expect.

The premise is a sort of alternative state of Britain, which has made some different scientific discoveries and has developed clone humans to use for spare parts.
Instead of setting it in some sort of Total Recall/Bladerunner/Terminator-esque world, we have English boarding schools, quaint farmyards and seaside homes.

Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield play Ruth, Kathy and Tommy - three young 'donors' who have been raised through the cloning process via a special school and are on the paths to their own destruction, yet accepting it in a surprisingly calm manner. I won't relate the whole story here, suffice to say their paths are quite intertwined.

There's a few more science fiction type stories that deal with the ideas of this novel, but I was reminded by its contrasts of the scenes in "O Lucky Man" when the Malcolm McDowell coffee salesman stumbles into a science research project which involves experiments with people and animals.

It's like the ideas in "O Lucky Man" with its altogether more jarring story have morphed into something both more genteel and also industrialised. A kind of erosion of the sensibilities.

Both stories play around with the role of the state and in the case of this novel and film there's the inevitable commercialisation of the processes involves, which ominously become more production lined for the successors of Ruth, Kathy and Tommy.