Ink & Insights Returns: Reading to Write, Writing to Grow
What Stories Reveal That Lessons Alone Never Can
Editor’s Note by
Welcome back to the Ink & Insights Book Circle. If you missed our first installment on Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, you can find it here.
This series is built on the simple idea that to be a good writer, you have to read great writing. Each month, we choose a book and write about what makes it worth reading. We focus on writers whose style is direct, personal, and doesn't rely too much on complex words or unusual rhetorical devices.
Kazuo Ishiguro is a great example. I love sharing this piece by Grace Iyer on Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go.” Ishiguro is an exceptional writer (he won the Nobel Prize in Literature), and his writing reflects a sense of the world that can be a helpful skill in learning to write. Every piece tells a story and also communicates something meaningful about the world and how we should live in it.
Finally, a reminder: read. Even thirty minutes a day can make a difference. A recent University of Florida study found that reading for pleasure has declined by 40% since 2003, with effects on everything from emotional well-being to communication skills. Building the habit of reading is one of the most powerful steps you can take toward becoming not just a stronger writer, but a more thoughtful person.
Citation
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005
Rent it from your local library using Libby, or buy it at your local independent bookstore!
Learning to Face the Future: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
The first Kazuo Ishiguro book I read was The Remains of the Day. I read it hungrily and eagerly. I loved it so much that I talked about it for months after. That book is set in postwar England, and follows the story of a butler working for a wealthy American man. The subject matter was not what appealed to me—I didn’t expect to find much in common between myself and a mid-century British butler. What I found, though, was that that butler, the book’s (highly unreliable) narrator, and I had incredibly alike internal monologues.
Mr. Stevens, as he’s named, reflects obsessively on his past experiences. He almost never addresses his present moment. He anxiously justifies his past decisions, reworking what happened to defend himself against some judgmental listener. This made sense to me: I have spent periods of my life living and re-living the past, anxiously worrying that I said or did the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time, and then trying to guard myself against guilt or shame by overexplaining those memories to some nonexistent critic. Slowly, though, Stevens starts to come to clarity. He recognizes where he has buckled to fear, where his duty to his social role has kept him from conflict or connection, and he tries to make right—not by re-writing the past or trying to control the future, but through acceptance and maybe, will to change.
What I gained from reading Remains was painful—the knowledge that a life lived in fear would only lead to regret, that there was a point at which it would be too late to fix mistakes—but I needed it. It allowed me to see a sort of vision into my own future if I continued to spend more time in my memories than I did with what was in front of me. I wanted the transformation that I saw in Stevens: to find acceptance, and then courage.
Never Let Me Go takes a similar approach to a different subject. Its characters are plagued by similar anxieties, fears, and hang-ups, and we witness them as they grow out of uncertain adolescence and into adults who deal honestly with what’s in front of them. This transformation is undergirded by a real heartbreak, though it’s impossible to explain why without spoiling the novel.
The book is a dystopian of sorts (meaning it’s set in a more oppressive alternate world), though it takes place in an otherwise unremarkable late 20th-century England. It centers around three characters: Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, who were all classmates at an elite boarding school called Hailsham. Kathy narrates the story of their adolescence and young adulthood from the present, when she’s in her early thirties. We learn first that Kathy is what she calls a “carer,” and the people she cares for are “donors.” It will be a long time before we start to glean any information about what these things mean, though these beginning pages offer a few suggestions. The work of donors is medical—Kathy talks about recovery times, she describes a donor “l[ying] there, all hooked up,” and we know that at some point this process “completes,” and that this part of the process includes “sleepless nights… drugs… pain and… exhaustion.”
Ishiguro never really attempts to explain how this system of carers and donors came about, nor does he bother to justify the science in his science fiction. The logistics of the world are less important than the emotional consequences. We are invited to share these emotions, as Kathy sometimes addresses the book to an unspecified “you.” This second-person direction makes us one of these yet unexplained carers: “I know carers, working now, who are just as good and don’t get half the credit. If you’re one of them, I can understand how you might get resentful.” Thus, there’s an intimacy to the book. Because the setting is not fantastical, and because there is no explanation of how the world became this way, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that it could happen to us, too. This feeling is undergirded by the treatment of us as carers alongside Kathy.
Kathy spends most of the book reflecting on their youth at Hailsham, specifically preoccupied with the relationships between Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy. Ruth dominates their friend group: “Then when Ruth looked at her watch and said even though we still had time, we should get back to the main house, nobody argued.” Tommy starts as an outcast, having childish tantrums that alienate him from his peers, and Kathy offers him a tentative sympathy that nobody else does. Kathy and Ruth have a particularly complicated relationship. Ruth dominates Kathy like she dominates everyone else, and as much as Kathy resents this, she still desires their connection. They both take pointed jabs at each other that damage their trust, but they always find themselves returning to a natural, dependent closeness. Kathy’s admitted unreliability as a narrator (“This was all a long time ago so I might have some of it wrong”) suggests a continued desire to protect Ruth’s image in the reader’s eyes.
It can feel frustrating, if not infuriating, how focused Kathy is on recounting what seem like minor teenage dramas, when their futures as “carers” and “donors” who will eventually “complete” looms ahead, but I think this is incredibly human. We all do this, obsessively renegotiate little conflicts and awkward moments when much bigger, much scarier things loom ahead of us. I’ll let Kathy explain in her own words what makes this book relatable:
“Thinking back now, I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves—about who we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside—but hadn’t yet understood what any of it meant. I’m sure somewhere in your childhood, you too had an experience like ours that day; similar if not in the actual details, then inside, in the feelings. Because it doesn’t really matter how well your guardians try to prepare you: all the talks, videos, discussions, warnings, none of that can really bring it home. Not when you’re eight years old, and you’re all together in a place like Hailsham; when you’ve got guardians like the ones we had; when the gardeners and the delivery men joke and laugh with you and call you ‘sweetheart.’”
Ishiguro’s writing is deceptively simple. His books are often written in first-person narration, meaning the main character tells the story, and he convincingly inhabits these characters. Kathy’s voice is conversational. She’s telling us her story, as if we are (like her donors) sitting in a room with her. It’s natural when we tell stories out loud that we jump around chronologically: we’re in the middle of explaining an event, and then we remember we forgot to share a crucial detail, and so we have to back up and contextualize, and maybe at some point we jump to the present to explain how we feel now (“I’m not even that upset about it…”) before we finish the story we were originally trying to tell. Of course, Ishiguro has crafted this story carefully, but it feels spontaneous. Perhaps Kathy is telling this story to comfort, or just to pass the time, but always when we tell stories we are building a narrative of ourselves. These narratives can distance us from the truth or, if we are willing to let them, bring us closer to it. There is relief in the pain of clarity.
If you’ve read the books, we’d love your thoughts. And of course, please share your suggestions for books to feature in the Ink and Insights Book Circle!