In the dystopian novel thread, we were talking about this book quite a bit. So I figured I’d just start a thread about it.
First reaction. Does anyone else want to mutilate the hell out of Ruth? Okay, okay, that’s probably already been done, but WOW. Girl is a bitch. And why the hell did everyone else listen to her and not start convincing her to take a long walk off a short pier?
Second–what was the point of educating all the clones? I know they talk about wanting people to realize they have souls…but why? Wouldn’t it be easier if everyone just thought of them as lifeless objects or robots?
Couldn’t they make them brain dead from birth, or comatose? Or why not just have someone give birth to them and then before they’re old enough to talk, start harvesting? Why wait till they get older? Why educate them at all? Not that I think that’s good, but if as a society, you’re at the point where you think it’s okay to turn someone into a walking organ factory, why not just make it as efficient as possible?
Why were they all so resigned about it? Clearly they didn’t want to die, but they knew they were going to, and none of them made an effort to fight the powers or run away or anything.
In all, I did think the part where we figure out what they’re for is cool, but I found it really slow. And very, very…I don’t know, petty. Like all these little details about how Ruth would say this and the others would try to let it go but then they’d contradict her and she’d flip out and…ugh. It was very irritating after a while.
Too late to edit but one of the amazon.com reviews has an interpretation that seems interesting.
That was an interesting thought. I did kind of feel when I was reading the narrative that Kathy was oddly robotic. I just never got why she really wanted to be with Tommy, although she clearly did. It was really hard to see her, or any of them, as real or as human. The way they analyzed every tiny detail made them really hard to relate to.
Yeah, Ruth always pissed me off. I’m not sure how anyone could tolerate her or why they would even bother. In the end, however, I suppose it would have made no difference - they were all going to end up as spare parts sooner or later. And in the end, I wonder if it wasn’t Kathy’s vision that was flawed, since Tommy turned away from her at the end, stating that Ruth would understand why, IIRC.
As far as why everyone accepted their fate, I feel like they never really imagined things could be different (except Ruth, perhaps). No one had family, or role models beyond the teachers. Kathy mentions at one point that she doesn’t even remember when they learned what their eventual fate would be, they were that young.
I was curious about that. She talks about “knowing and not knowing” which I didn’t get because of that scene with Miss Lucy where she says, “You’re going to donate your vital organs and none of you are going to be actors or anything like that.” What was the point of telling them point blank like that if they already knew? She says they kind of already knew but…really?
I think it was to stop them from having any kind of ambition or desire to be something else. The point was to remind them that all these idle daydreams could never happen, so they shouldn’t waste their time or emotional energy pining after impossible hopes.
I read it as part of a book club, and it generated a lot of conversation.
One of the points that caused the most heated discussion was about what Madame’s goal was in proving the children weren’t soulless.
There were some people in my book club who thought that Madame and her little group – was it a foundation? – had the ultimate goal of ending the donations, that they were trying to prove the students had souls and were thus fully human with all the rights and privileges that implies.
I, however, and some others, thought that it was more like those people who advocate for free range chickens. Just because someone is essentially meat on the hoof doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a nice quality, comfortable environment. There were very few schools that provided what Hailsham did … from talking to other carers and donors, Kathy learns that most of the schools were not very nice places at all. I do agree that Madam herself waivered on this issue, but the point of the foundation was not to liberate the clones but merely to treat them kindly the way we believe pets should be treated with kindness.
And one of things that I liked is that they were so resigned … it’s not a book about whether cloning humans for organ donation is right or wrong, it’s a book about how individuals function within a society that clones humans for organ donation. I think if you had characters who resisted more actively, it would really shift the focus of the book to the right v. wrong issue.
Okay, I think this makes sense to me. Kind of like how we think PETA are nutcases for acting as though we should treat animals exactly like people, but a great deal of us would advocate for treating them as well as we can.
But my question is that why bother elevating them to the level of personhood? I can sort of see why Miss Emily and Madam would think that, but if we’re in a world where we think harvesting people for organs is cool, why don’t they just clone people and harvest at birth, all at once? (Or if that’s not possible, when they get to be a few years older.) And why prolong it–you’d think this way they could just take ALL the organs. Eyes, heart, pancreas, liver, kidneys, why stop at four?
I’m assuming that that’s probably where we’re heading, though. Madam said she teared up seeing Kathy dancing because she was afraid of a world that wasn’t going to treat the kids well. And Hailsham got shut down. Perhaps in the future, they were going to do less and less nice things for the clones and start treating them more and more like expendable things.
So why were things as they were in the book? Was it that everyone just wanted to pretend like things weren’t that bad–hence the seemingly unnecessary stuff like serving as a carer? This way we can pretend that, “Hey, we’re raising people for their organs, but we’re treating them well.” And then eventually even that facade disappears.
delphica–what did you think of the comments of that Amazon.com reviewer that I posted in the thread’s second post? The idea that the people seem so robotic, that it’s almost like their souls have been bread out. Did you feel like Kathy and Ruth and co were soulless or is that a little too out there?
Trying to put myself in the mindset of someone in that society, I would guess that if the clones are given some level of personhood they can function as carers before they become donors. That might help the society keep a distance from the donors - real people don’t have to be bothered with their care (that might be disturbing, and also lead to more people thinking that the donors are fully human). Also, with some level of personhood they can live independently, if they were literally kept in cages like animals you’d have to have a big infrastructure to support that. And you don’t need the eyes, heart, liver etc all at once, it’s not as if everyone who needs a transplant suddenly needs one at the exact same time. I guess it’s possible you could harvest the organs at one go and keep them “alive” in vats, or whatever, but (and obviously the novel doesn’t go into this) maybe it’s more cost effective just to keep them inside of an expendable person.
I’m not sure what I think about that reviewer’s comments … they’re not really bred at all in the classic sense. They’re clones, and I guess there could have been some genetic engineering (I did wonder if, because they cloned destitute people, the clones were more likely to be addicts or suffer from mental illness or whatever) to give them specific traits, but I didn’t get the impression their personalities were artificially modified on a genetic level. My take on the book is that their values were modified because they lived in that particular society, not unlike how our own society shapes our values and behaviors.
On the other hand, it’s a book that leaves many things unanswered, and obviously for me part of the appeal is that the reader can speculate a lot about why things are the way they are.
I kind of got the sense that the them serving as carers was busywork. They clearly had nurses on hand for the real work. Kathy does seem to take pride in her donors doing well/not dying…but it just doesn’t seem like the carers do all that much. I got the sense that it was another one of those “let’s make them feel useful” things that people like Madam and Miss Emily thought were a good idea.
That makes sense, though, that maybe it’s better to keep the organs in their bodies until people need them. Still, though, I don’t know why it’s necessary for any of them to live past childhood. And maybe this was going to start to change.
I don’t know if I got this from the text or just assumed it, but I thought each clone was for a specific person. That is, a nonclone could pay or choose to have a clone made for them, and when they are old/sick and need the organs, they can harvest them, ready made for them alone. That’s why some people remain carers for a long time, whether they are good at it or not, and some get harvested right away - it depends on the needs of the person from whom they were cloned. Is there something I missed about them being cloned from the destitute?
I don’t think that’s right. I mean, it would be a good idea, but they do say at one point (well Ruth does) that the office lady probably isn’t her “possible.” That they’re usually cloned from the dregs of society–junkies, prostitutes, etc. That’s why Kathy keeps looking through the porn magazines for her possible–the person whom she was cloned from.
Really, the thing that bugged me about the book was how really… I dunno, expository the scene was when they finally went to ask Madam for a deferral. C’mon, Ishiguro, you can do so much better than that.
1.) Brain dead or comatose would require a lot of specialized medical equipment to maintain. Conscious people feed and otherwise maintain their own bodies.
2.) It was my impression that they wouldn’t have even had the technology to genetically engineer the organ-donor bodies without brains. It was like they lucked out on cloning, but without really understanding the science behind it enough to do anything else.
3.) Baby or child organs won’t be compatible with adult bodies. They’re just not large enough/developed enough. Unless you were transplanting into another kid, it wouldn’t work.
It’s all they’ve ever known, and there’s nowhere to run to. Imagine you’re a slave in antebellum America. Now imagine that slavery is legal everywhere on the continent; not only that, but there are **no **free Black people. That’s their situation.
I was wondering about the child organs–I wasn’t sure if you could just donate kid organs to adults. But if you can’t, that does make sense.
And granted, there isn’t anywhere to go, but they look like anyone else. Wouldn’t it be easy to just go to some small town, drop off the radar? I mean even people born into slavery knew it’s wrong and that there’s something better to hope for. Then again, in the antebellum South, there were states where slavery wasn’t allowed.
It’s an interesting question. How bad does your situation have to be before you start hoping for better. If everyone around you was poor, had little to eat and no luxuries, would you think that was normal and just adjust to it? Is it only knowing that there’s a better life that makes you yearn for something more?
Which always makes me wonder about characters in dystopias who start fighting the system. If it’s all they’ve known, why are they discontent? In some cases, they’re not (mostly everyone in Brave New World, save Bernard until he gets some loving/attention/celebrity is happy). But, like, in 1984, if everyone was just used to Big Brother, why was Winston so upset about it? Or did he remember the way life was pre Big Brother?
Clearly the kids in the book wanted something more–even if it was just three or four years extra with someone they loved before dying. At the end even when Tommy was donating they still went to Madame. But when their hopes were dashed, I suppose that was it for them. No fighting the machine, no resisting.
The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.
Thanks, filling pages. And I think you’re right about it being Ruth’s theory that the clones came from the dregs of society. But I don’t think it was just her theory–it sounds like a lot of people also thought that.
But if all the parts are just going back to the original person, why do most people do four donations? It doesn’t seem likely that one person is going to need four new organs one right after the other.
Though I guess that’s not really the point of the book when you get down to it.
Are they one right after another, though, or more spaced out? Like I said, this is all just my take on it, but I figured that since people had access to personalized cloned organs, they were living longer and taking advantage of that fact. And if people were choosing to have clones made, they would be adults when that happened and much older than the clones themselves. So, when the original is in their 60s or 70s and needing a heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, etc, the clones would just be between 20 and 40.
It seemed like it was more like you’d wait a while, then they’d call you up to become a donor. Then there’d be operations. It seemed to take place over the course of months, not years. But I’m not entirely sure. It was all kind of vague–I got the sense that we were supposed to be identifying with the donor kids. Like, they don’t really know what all the rules and regulations are. They hear rumors that maybe you can get a deferral, maybe you can find your “possible.” Just as we’re not entirely sure what all the exact rules of the society were, neither were they. And maybe that was the point–if you don’t know everything you can’t really do anything about it. Everything’s kept from you.