Anita Desai reviews Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro in the New York Review of Books:
While reading several new novels published this past spring, one is struck by the way that the British novelists who take up the issues of our times prefer to do so not directly but at an angle. There is Ian McEwan, who, in addressing the shock of 9/11 (or 11/9 as it is spoken of in Europe), chose Mrs. Dalloway as a model and Virginia Woolf’s way of including the horrors of World War II in a sunlit day of an English summer. Now we have Kazuo Ishiguro dealing with the present hotly debated issue of cloning by seeming to revert to an old tradition of British boarding school stories. McEwan’s pleasant, bourgeois world is drenched in golden light. Ishiguro’s more austere scene is cast in the pearly, opaque light with which we tend to drape the past; he hints at the shadows that lie around but chooses to keep them at a decorous distance.
The world Ishiguro creates is both similar to the one we know from our schooldays and yet not quite so.
More here.
