What kind of documentation would they need, though? With the prejudice against clones that their society seems to have, wouldn’t people be suspicious?
I don’t think the organs are going back to the clone-ee. I think the clones were established as a living organ bank where you don’t have to wait for the person to die to harvest. Obviously you’d get the most successful transplants off of an exact match, but with a big enough pool of clones (and especially in a country like England, where the population is more genetically homogenous), you could pretty closely match most people.
ETA: I just noticed that the current ad on top of my Gmail is for “Chicago area’s finest organ movers.” :smack:
True. I’m just kind of surprised that there wasn’t an underground free the clones movement. There are people who find the way we treat animals abhorrent in today’s society. This is even worse.
Plus, logically, there’s the fact that clones are humans. Is an identical twin any less human? I know that in pop culture, people often think of clones as creepy or weird, but we have them in nature–sure, not that often, but still. They’re just like you or me except that they share genetic material with someone else. I don’t see why people would all of a sudden just think, “Oh, a clone–how subhuman.”
Then again, maybe I give people too much credit. After all, look at all the disgusting things done to people just for having the “wrong” shade of skin.
I suppose I just don’t want to think that this could ever happen. But when you think about it, we’ve never needed much of an excuse to treat others badly.
I think that’s what it is. Humans have demonstrated a remarkable ability to dehumanize our fellow people over trivial differences when there’s a benefit to be had. Less than 150 years ago, we still maintained the fiction that the amount of melanin someone’s skin produced determined their intelligence and worth, because it was economically convenient to do so. I don’t think it’s out of the question that we could say that someone who’d been created in a petri dish with only one parent wasn’t human, so that we could help ourselves live longer.
Perhaps there is, but it’s happening among different people than ones we see in this book. That is one of the reasons I love this book so much … sometimes when I read books about underground liberation movements, I wonder about what life is like for some random people who aren’t involved but are rather just muddling through the best they can, living their life whatever that implies. Never Let Me Go is that story for me.
Yes, it does feel the most realistic. In books like 1984 or This Perfect Day or the Giver, it’s cool that there’s this element of resistance. But it also makes you wonder, what is life like for most of the people–the ones who can’t or don’t know how to rebel, the everyman/woman.
I also felt that way a bit when reading Oryx and Crake. Jimmy obviously knows people rebelling but he himself is just another ordinary guy watching it all happen.
You guys have nailed what I think was compelling about this book - It didn’t matter if scientifically the set-up made no sense. It was about (at least in part) what it would be like to be in the place of the clones. They had no full understanding of the situation, no way to express themselves and no power to oppose their fate. I found it very compelling and symbolic of oppressed persons in general.
I agree, and I love how claustrophobic it felt, how they were so concerned with the minutiae of interpersonal relationships when to the reader, there were so clearly bigger issues to be thinking about. It kind of drove me crazy as a reader to want to know why they were there, what they were doing, and so on, not what Tommy and Ruth thought about sex, but that just emphasized how they accepted their lives.
This question creeped out my book club too, but since we didn’t reach a satisfactory answer for me at least, I’ll ask again. (I clearly have a disturbingly morbid streak.) How many vital organs can a human donate and not die instantly? I figure they could donate a kidney, for sure (that must be the first one - but how many kidneys are really needed?). Parts of lungs? Livers? I have absolutely no medical background so I can’t begin to figure this out, or is it a question Ishiguro obviously intends us not to ask?
I wondered that, too. Four is a lot. Can you put someone on…I don’t know, some kind of life support while they donate? The donors looked pretty weak after their operations and a lot of them died, but not all. I wondered why more of them didn’t.
From what I can remember: one kidney, one lung, part of your liver. I’m guessing that’s the kind of stuff they’re pulling out for the first few harvests, and then the last one goes after the heart, second kidney, second lung, and the rest of the liver. Dunno whether they’d take corneas and such before or after the last harvest.