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Like Ishiguro's previous works (The Remains of the Day; When We Were
Orphans), his sixth novel is so exquisitely observed that even the
most workaday objects and interactions are infused with a luminous, humming
otherworldliness. The dystopian story it tells, meanwhile, gives it a different
kind of electric charge.
Set in late 1990s England, in a parallel universe
in which humans are cloned and raised expressly to "donate" their healthy
organs and thus eradicate disease from the normal population, this is an
epic ethical horror story, told in devastatingly poignant miniature. By
age 31, narrator (and clone) Kathy H has spent nearly 12 years as a "carer"
to dozens of "donors." Knowing that her number is sure to come up soon,
she recounts—in excruciating detail—the fraught, minute dramas of her happily
sheltered childhood and adolescence at Hailsham, an idyllic, isolated school/orphanage
where clone-students are encouraged to make art and feel special. Protected
(as is the reader, at first) from the full truth about their eventual purpose
in the larger world, "we [students] were always just too young to understand
properly the latest piece of information. But of course we'd take it in
at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads
without us ever having examined it properly." This tension of knowing-without-knowing
permeates all of the students' tense, sweetly innocent interactions, especially
Kath's touchingly stilted love triangle with two Hailsham classmates, manipulative
Ruth and kind-hearted Tommy. In savoring the subtle shades of atmosphere
and innuendo in these three small, tightly bound lives, Ishiguro spins a
stinging cautionary tale of science outpacing ethics.
Publishers Weekly
