I promise, I will not read Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel. You will do no harm telling me the surprise ending. Really.
The reviews call it an important book, Ishiguro’s best so far. I rarely read important novels. I prefer silly ones.
The story concerns a group of children at a British boarding school. It is a nice place, lots of arts and music programs. Very little contact with the Outside World. But then they graduate and go outside, and they discover …
Something really shocking. Perhaps that It’s a Cookbook! or the Soylent Green is People! or something.
If you know, post a boxed spoiler for me. I won’t tell anyone. I promise.
Found it. On Amazon, the review for the hardback. (I had already checked the paperback review before I posted.)
Yep, I guessed it.
That reviewer should be taken out and shot. The point of the book is the unfolding of the premise.
Paul in Saudi, I would really encourage you to read Never Let Me Go. It’s quite a decent book, and more to the point, it’s eminently readable, unlike some of his other works. Case in point: The Unconsoled, which I felt sure would have been a good book if I’d only been able to slog through it and make some sense of it!
I won’t go so far as to say Never Let Me Go is a light read, exactly, but I was able to use it as reading material on a cross-country airplane trip–it’s not heavy prose at all. And as for knowing the ending…
Do we not watch Citizen Kane just because we know about
Do we not read On the Beach just because we know that
all the characters are going to die in a nuclear holocaust at the end?
Do we not watch A Streetcar Named Desire simply because we know that
Stanley rapes Blanche and she goes insane?
I think not!
And anyway, the point of Never Let Me Go is, as twickster said, how the scenario unfolds–it’s not sprung on you as a Bradbury-esque trick ending or anything.
Long post, but I truly do feel it’s worthwhile to read this novel.
There was a non-spoiler discussion of this one in The Economist. I thought about what the ending could be, and I came up with the correct one. That is a little disappointing and seems unimaginative.
Of course I guessed the Sixth Sense from the movie trailers. I suppose since I live in the same culture and time as the writers it is easy to think as they think.
Moby Dick however surprised me. I never suspected the whale did it.