The Book Corner season 5: Book vs film. Episode 4: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin vs Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki
A Wizard of Earthsea became an instant classic of children’s fantasy when it arrived in 1968. It launched six novels exploring the wizards, peoples, lands and creatures of the Earthsea archipelago. In 2006, Studio Ghibli delivered Tales from Earthsea, an animated feature based on Le Guin’s works. It’s a very different beast.
- A Wizard of Earthsea: the story
- A Wizard of Earthsea: a writer’s review
- Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki
The Book Corner
The Book Corner is a regular break from critiquing for the writing group of my former MA colleagues. We work out a theme and each of us chooses a book to read and discuss. Previous themes have included literary genre award winners and books that shaped our writing journeys. So far this year, I’m just about keeping up with the schedule as we read them.
As usual, it’s an odd mix with a skew towards SF and fantasy, and in this season we’re comparing books to their screen adaptations. Catch up with Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, The Dark Tower vol 1 — The Gunslinger by Stephen King and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. Coming up: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft (vs the bonkers Nicolas Cage adap.) and Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones.
A Wizard of Earthsea: the story
Ged is a magically gifted peasant boy living on the isle of Gont, where he’s also known as Sparrowhawk. (No one reveals their true names in Earthsea, except to their most trusted confidantes.)
He foils a barbarian attack on his village, displaying his abilities. The village witch sends Ged to the island’s grand wizard, Ogion, but in his impatience, Ged summons a strange shadow. Ogion banishes the shadow but encourages Ged to realise his potential. He must sail to Roke, the wizard’s school on an island at the heart of Earthsea.
Ged’s talent impresses his teachers and he develops a deep friendship with older student Vetch. However, his arrogance leads to a rivalry with Jasper, another talented student. When they compete to best each other, Ged attempts to summon the dead, but instead releases the shadow creature.
The Archmage Nemmerle sacrifices himself to banish the shadow, and Ged is badly scarred. The new Archmage, Gensher, warns that the shadow is a nameless ancient evil. It wants to possess Ged and will continue to seek him out.
A wizard in Earthsea
Ged graduates from Roke and becomes wizard to the distant Ninety Isles. There he negotiates peace with the dragon who rules a neighbouring island.
The shadow returns and Ged flees to the isle of Osskil, seeking the stone of the Terrenon. He believes that it will help him to defeat the shadow, and seeks refuge in the Court of Terrenon. Ged discovers that the stone imprisons an evil Old Power which offers to help him if he sets it free.
He refuses, and escapes the court by transforming into a falcon that outflies the stone’s creatures. His long flight back to Ogion almost traps Ged in the bird’s form. Ogion is convinced that the shadow has a name and that it can be controlled. Ged faces the shadow and it flees from him.
Ged’s flight becomes a pursuit across Earthsea. He reunites with his old friend Vetch and ultimately confronts the shadow. Ged recognises his own darkness and merges with the shadow. He is whole for the first time since Roke.
A Wizard of Earthsea: a writer’s review
I first read A Wizard of Earthsea at school in the early 1980s, and I don’t remember enjoying it. Very likely that came down to two things: I didn’t like being told what to read and I was comparing it to the D&D-style fantasy I was reading at the time.
Books like the Dragonlance Chronicles were full of Tolkienesque ‘proper’ fantasy creatures. They had magical battles between well-defined good and evil forces, and epic confrontations that fit a typical Hero’s Journey plot.
It’s a shame that I didn’t find the Earthsea stories on my own. Le Guin has a wonderfully lyrical prose and she doesn’t dumb down her style for children; she just happens to be writing about a young man. Ged doesn’t throw fireballs, he gets a lot wrong and he’s not a likeable hero or fun to travel with. He solves problems through negotiation, he resists temptation, and his spiritual victory is about as far as you can get from a spectacular conquest of his enemy. I can see why teachers and adults are fond of the sympathetic road to humility on which Le Guin takes her protagonist, and why it didn’t win me over.
As a writer, I’m now beginning to question dominance of the Hero’s Journey. It’s become a cultural straitjacket upon modern storytelling, most obviously in genre fiction. Le Guin plots her own course and refuses to conform to the monomyth.
She uses intriguing Taoist themes within her worldbuilding and introduced original conceits like the power of true names. Her dismissal of conflict to resolve problems is as challenging to the status quo now as it was almost 40 years ago.
Earthsea, the original
Earthsea is a creation that Le Guin had clearly developed in painstaking detail. Yet she doesn’t overwhelm the reader with background and history. Instead, she merely hints at untold stories that enrich the world without derailing the main narrative. One drawback is that she often mentions Ged’s future adventures, so there’s no doubt that he will survive his trials. It expands the epic scale but reduces the tension.
One surprising aspect of A Wizard of Earthsea is how little it connects to Le Guin’s reputation as a feminist writer of science fiction and fantasy who often challenged tropes of a male-dominated genre. As a Black hero in a world where the only white characters are dangerous barbarian invaders, Ged is revolutionary for a novel published in 1968.
Yet female characters are almost insignificant in this instalment of the Earthsea chronicles. There are no female wizards on Roke, and the background presents women as wives and servants in a male-dominated society. The audience for children’s fantasy literature was thought to be almost exclusively male at this time, so perhaps either Le Guin or her publisher thought that female wizards would be too much for them.
Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki
Screen adaptations haven’t been kind to Earthsea, but this one is better than the 2004 Sci Fi Channel series which whitewashed Ged, among other crimes. Tales from Earthsea was the younger Miyazaki’s debut feature for Studio Ghibli, and Le Guin reportedly believed that Hayao Miyazaki would be in charge. It bears no relation to the eponymous 2001 collection of Le Guin’s short stories and essays.
This film combines elements of several Earthsea books into a new story, so that several characters and events don’t make sense. It showcases the best and worst of the Ghibli style: stunning background art populated by flat characters with limited expressions, and dialogue that’s often clichéd and expository — the exception being a gorgeous dragon. The story resolves in a traditional battle that’s out of character for an Earthsea tale.
Tales from Earthsea is probably best seen by Ghibli completists and best avoided by fans of Le Guin’s own stories. If you want to see a good Ghibli, we’ll be doing Howl’s Moving Castle in a few months’ time.
What’s better, book or film? They’re hard to compare, but it’s the book. Le Guin’s original is a classic but Miyazaki uses it to make Ghibli-by-numbers.
The Book Corner season 5, episode 5: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Nobel laureate, anglophile and SF dilettante Kazuo Ishiguro took on cloning in his 2005 novel, which Alex Garland adapted into a film starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield in 2010.
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The Book Corner season 5: Book vs film. Episode 8: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
The whimsical beauty of Hayao Miyazaki’s hit 2004 animation of Howl’s Moving Castle has eclipsed the clever fairytale of Diana Wynne Jones’s 1986 novel. Which one’s your favourite?
Howl’s Moving Castle: the story
Howl’s Moving Castle: a writer’s review
Howl’s Moving Castle: the film
The Book Corner
The Book Corner is a regular break from critiquing for the writing group of my former MA colleagues. We work out a theme and everyone chooses a book that we’ll read and discuss. Previous themes have included literary genre award winners and books that shaped our writing journeys. So far this year, I’m just about keeping up with the schedule as we read them.
As usual, it’s an odd mix with a skew towards SF and fantasy. Catch up with Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, The Dark Tower vol 1 — The Gunslinger by Stephen King and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin vs Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft.
Howl’s Moving Castle: the story
Howl’s Moving Castle has a lot of story, with subplots for a dozen minor characters. Fortunately, they resolve into the main plot around Sophie Hatter, the wizard Howl and the Witch of the Waste.
Simpering 18-year-old Sophie is the eldest of three orphaned sisters in Market Chipping, a very English fairytale town in the magical kingdom of Ingary. She works in the family milliner’s shop, but she’s convinced of the popular superstition that the eldest child will never be successful. Her stepmother enjoys the wealth brought in my Sophie’s hat-making talents and courting new husbands.
The Witch of the Waste — an infamous sorceress — visits the hat shop, accuses Sophie of being a witch and curses her to become an old crone. Sophie doesn’t know it but the Witch is correct: she can talk life into lifeless objects. She leaves the shop seek help for her affliction, telling no-one.
An exhausted Sophie encounters the sinister floating castle of notorious wizard Howl, which roams the hills around Market Chipping. Despite her fears, she thinks the wizard might fix her predicament, but the curse also stops her telling anyone about it. She jumps on board and discovers an untidy kitchen where she falls asleep. On waking, she meets the wizard’s teenaged apprentice Michael, and Calcifer, a fire demon trapped in the hearth.
Sophie appoints herself cleaning lady to the castle and strikes a bargain with Calcifer to lift her curse if she can break his contract. The only problem: neither Howl nor Calcifer can disclose the main clause. Her only clue is a mysterious poem.
The wizard of woo
The dandyish Howl grudgingly accepts Sophie’s help as he goes about an apparently carefree life. His main passtime is romancing a series of women including Sophie’s younger sister, Lettie.
Sophie learns that the kitchen’s door also exits to places other than Market Chipping. There’s Porthaven, an idyllic fishing town, Kingsbury, the capital of Ingary, and modern-day Wales. Howl was born there as Howell Jenkins, and his family think he’s an idler who disappears for months on end. While he’s vain and cowardly, he’s also intelligent, charming, endearing and occasionally considerate.
The king of Ingary calls upon Howl to find his brother, who has gone missing, and to kill the Witch of the Wastes. Howl doesn’t want to help because the Witch has already cursed him.
The Witch captures Sophie by pretending that she has kidnapped Howl’s current love interest, Miss Angorian. Howl defeats the Witch, but discovers that Miss Angorian is really the Witch’s fire demon. It wants to kill Howl and take his head to create the perfect human vessel for itself.
Miss Angorian tricks her way into the castle and siezes Calcifer to control Howl. The wizard kept Calcifer alive by giving him his heart in exchange for magical power. Sophie gives Calcifer life so he can break his contract and restore Howl’s heart, then Howl destroys Miss Angorian.
Calcifer lifts Sophie’s curse but decides to stay in the castle. Howl had all along known Sophie was under a spell, and they have fallen in love while she was disguised.
The 1986 first edition of Howl’s Moving Castle was illustrated by Tim Stevens (also in the Kindle edition).
Howl’s Moving Castle: a writer’s review
Diana Wynne Jones begins Howl’s Moving Castle with a bold announcement that this fairy tale won’t play by the rules.
The heroine should be the ugly step-sister, her stepmother is far from wicked and there are not one but two evil magicians. Readers who don’t pay attention will miss out on red herrings and important details.
As a boy, I would have found the opening chapters all too twee and girly, though Jones wastes no time turning Sophie’s life upside-down. Her characters and locations are vibrant, and the story never seems more than a few pages from a fresh mystery or surprise.
Sophie’s curse also transforms her into a heroine determined to save herself and speak her mind. The transformational power of identity is a key theme, found in multiple characters and locations.
Even Wales feels real
Ingary has enough context that it feels like a real place, able to exist beyond the confines of the story. Indeed, Wales feels as fantastic as anywhere else when it’s seen through Sophie’s eyes.
Despite the many threads demanded by a large cast, everything is tied up as far as it needs to be. The central romance draws on a trope of enemies to lovers, but their attraction develops organically. Howl’s actions win Sophie’s affection, not his good looks, and she remains a crone until the denouement.
The castle also provides a venue for comic relief as her attempts to tidy the castle unleash as much chaos as order. These set pieces are crucial to the development of an alternative family for Sophie in her exile.
Even the Witch proves a tragic villain, self-destructively addicted to the fire demon’s power. It’s a warning to Howl and Calcifer, and makes her defeat appear like an act of mercy.
Howl’s Moving Castle: the film
Hayao Miyazaki’s animated vision streamlines the complex subplots and busy cast, and his steampunk realisation of the castle is wildly different yet fabulously successful on screen.
The most dramatic differences affect Howl and the Witch of the Waste. The cowardly wizard becomes a Batman-esque hero, playboy by day and winged warrior by night. The Witch is a minor threat, turned into a helpless old lady in a show of the real villain’s power.
The flying battleships are beautifully drawn from the art of science fiction’s silver age, and the airborne set-pieces are a highlight. It’s impossible not to love the scene when Sophie, Markl and the scarecrow hang washing on the castle as she tidies their home. Calcifer is playfully portrayed as a devilish yet loveable fire demon.
The real threat is Madam Suliman, an evil wizard-politician who controls the king of Ingary and bombs her own people in a senseless war. There’s an obvious message of “war bad, politicians evil” but Suliman is moustache-twirlingly unsubtle and one-dimensional.
Sophie is sadly diminished from a sorceress in her own right to a gentled love interest for Howl, there to draw out his sensitive side. More than anything, this left a bad taste after the novel.
This is the second Studio Ghibli adaptation that we’ve seen this season. It shares with Tales From Earthsea a shallow, fragile beauty that bears little scrutiny. You’ll enjoy this if you buy into the Ghibli experience but there were key moments where it gave me a hard bounce.
Markl, scarecrow and the dog-man in Studio Ghibli’s adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle.
What’s better, book or film? The film’s as beautiful and charming as you’d expect, but Miyazaki takes an unforgivable liberty with Sophie’s character and clumsy moral messaging.
The Book Corner will return
The group is still arguing about the theme of our next list, but there will be another season of the Book Corner. If it’s taking a while to happen, I’ll pull something from my recent reading list next month.
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The Book Corner season 5: Book vs film. Episode 6: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.
Alice Sebold’s 2002 debut novel delivered a bold and uplifting take on a brutal child murder story. In 2009, The Lovely Bones became a film by Peter Jackson, but neither the critics nor the box office warmed to his faithful adaptation.
The Lovely Bones: the story
The Lovely Bones: a writer’s review
The Lovely Bones: the film
The Book Corner
The Book Corner is a regular break from critiquing for the writing group of my former MA colleagues. We work out a theme and everyone chooses a book that we’ll read and discuss. Previous seasons have included literary genre award winners and books that shaped our writing journeys.
In this season, we’re comparing books to their feature-length adaptations. Catch up with Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, The Dark Tower vol 1 — The Gunslinger by Stephen King and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin vs Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki, and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Coming up: The Color Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft (vs the bonkers Nicholas Cage adap.) and Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones.
The Lovely Bones: the story
The Lovely Bones is narrated posthumously by Susie Salmon, a Pennsylvania middle-grader in 1973. When she is raped and murdered by a neighbour as she walks home, her spirit flees to her personal heaven. She can only move on when she comes to terms with her death.
Over the next eight years, Susie observes the loss and grief of those left behind. Suspicions gather slowly towards, George Harvey, who’s revealed to be a serial murderer. This isn’t, however, a cat-and-mouse story about the hunt for a cunning killer. It’s about the ripples which spread out from an act of appalling violence that leaves a family without closure.
Susie sees those ripples affect the relationship between her parents, Jack and Abigail, her younger siblings Lindsey and Buckley, and Abigail’s mother, Lynn. Jack becomes obsessed with finding Susie’s killer and fixes on Harvey. Abigail grows nostalgic for the ambitions she sacrificed to raise Buckley and eventually leaves the family home.
Jack’s obsession with Harvey almost leads to a tragic accident, but Lindsey grows to share his obsession. She eventually exposes Harvey in a daring exploration of his home. The killer becomes a fugitive and Susie’s family find some relief from their pain. Lindsey embarks on a relationship with her future husband, Samuel Heckler. Susie faces a future in which she will never grow old and fall in love.
Lives less ordinary
The ripples of her murder spread beyond Susie’s family. Best friend Clarissa grieves and grows, while first kiss Ray Singh is an early suspect. Misfit Ruth Connors is touched by Susie’s spirit as she flees her death, changing her forever.
In heaven, Susie is befriended by Holly, a child whose death is never explained. Her mentor is Franny, a former social worker who was shot by a man looking for his estranged wife. Later she meets Flora, who was Harvey’s first victim.
Susie is occasionally visible to Buckley, and Ruth’s encounter with Susie’s spirit leaves her forever connected to the afterlife. Ruth and Ray become friends, and in a bizarre moment Ruth is able to gift Susie her body for a few hours. Ray recognises Susie, they make love, and she is released from her youthful crush.
Jack suffers a heart attack after an argument with Buckley, and Abigail returns to her family. The family’s reunion releases Susie to enter an idyllic afterlife, although she’s still able to watch over them.
Mark Wahlberg and Saoirse Ronan in The Lovely Bones, 2009.
The Lovely Bones: a writer’s review
The Lovely Bones opens with a paragraph that leaves you in no doubt of Susie’s fate or the time period. It paints a simple picture of her too, but the final sentence sets the tone.
Susie’s rape and murder is all the more unpleasant because you know the murder’s coming but you’re unprepared for the unflinching depiction of her experience. Every whimsical, heartwarming moment that follows is overshadowed by the knowledge of George Harvey’s desire to commit unspeakable acts. It’s as if Sebold has flavoured hot chocolate with a teaspoon of salt.
Unfortunately, The Lovely Bones arrived at a time when I wasn’t in the mood for a dark story. It took me a while to pick it up and discover the secular heaven built from Susie’s everyday experience. Yet Sebold dwells there only briefly before she eases you back into the tragedy unfolding on Earth.
The narrative voice of a dead teenager allows Sebold to employ the perspectives of both first and third person. Susie’s personal voice is tinged with sadness, horror and melancholy. While Susie is forever fourteen years old, there’s a sense that she has grown in the years since her murder.
Her observational distance enables a complex world populated with rich characters. Every writer wants to create characters who the read can imagine living beyond the story. Ruana Singh, Ray’s mother, is a memorable character who could probably fill her own novel, as could Ruth Connors.
What goes around, comes around
At times, the connections feel too neat and make the world feel small, particularly at the story’s conclusion. However, these links also ground the story, prevent the numerous narratives sprawling out of control, and drive its themes.
I’m wary of epigrammatic endings where the author explains what the story is about — they remind me of the moral moment you used to get at the end of kids’ cartoons.
The meaning of The Lovely Bones, and the paragraph it comes from, is the key to Susie’s exit from purgatory to true heaven, and it should probably be the final paragraph. It’s also the right title, focusing the reader on the enlightenment which Susie ultimately achieves and the positive message that she delivers in her conclusion. The original title — Monsters — paid too much credit to the antagonist.
Unfortunately, the titular line is not in the final paragraph. Instead, Sebold dilutes her message with an increasingly saccharine closure to every thread. There’s even a karmic death for Harvey that hints at supernatural agency, though I found it too convenient. I’m not sure that this epilogue is necessary, although it’s hard for any writer to leave these threads dangling.
Susie Salmon’s ethereal heaven in The Lovely Bones, 2009.
The Lovely Bones: the film
Poster art for the 2009 film The Lovely Bones.
Peter Jackson has a reputation for juxtaposing light and darkness, so The Lovely Bones seems like a fitting project. He rejected an earlier script that turned Susie’s heavenly narration into a figment of her grieving father’s imagination, and embraced the uplifting, ethereal tone.
He probably goes too far, with a lurid heaven that’s at odds with the quotidian afterlife in Sebold’s novel. Her murder becomes part of the film’s climax and while the rape is downplayed, Stanley Tucci is a chilling George Harvey. Saoirse Ronan perfectly fits Susie’s girl-next-door cuteness, Susan Sarandon embraces the dark comedy of Lynn’s alcoholic affection for her family, and Rachel Weisz embodies Abigail’s frustrated mother. Mark Wahlberg, unfortunately, lacks the gravitas for Jack, and simply doesn’t look like a man who makes ships in bottles.
No-one could fit this much story into a film that didn’t over-run, so Jackson focuses on Jack’s hunt for Susie’s killer. Harvey becomes an ongoing threat to Lindsey, but that tension rises at the expense of Abigail’s story. Drawing Holly and Franny into the circle of Harvey’s former victims simplifies his history and adds to the suggestion that his death is no accident.
The sentimentalometer dials up to 11 on several occasions, despite the darkness. Even so, a 32% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and 42/100 on Metacritic feel like harsh verdicts.
What’s better, book or film? The book has a breadth and darkness that Jackson’s film fails to capture.
The Book Corner season 5, episode 7: The Color Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft
I choose an HP Lovecraft short for my turn in the Book Corner this season, partly to revisit a story and an author that I hadn’t read for more than three decades. Mostly, though, it’s because the adaptation stars Nicholas Cage being Nicholas Cage, in the tale of a simple New England farmer visited by something terrifying, alien and beyond description.
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The Book Corner season 5: Book vs film. Episode 5: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro’s sixth novel was published in 2005 and its film adaptation, scripted by Alex Garland, was released in 2010. Read on, and I’ll explain why the novel is a great example of bad storytelling that the film fails to redeem.
Never Let Me Go: the story
Never Let Me Go: a writer’s review
Never Let Me Go: the film
The Book Corner
The Book Corner is a regular break from critiquing with the writing group of my former MA colleagues. We work out a theme and everyone chooses a book that we’ll read and discuss. Previous themes have included literary genre award winners and books that shaped our writing journeys. This year, my goal is to review the books as we read them.
As usual, it’s an odd mix with a skew towards SF and fantasy, and in this season we’re comparing books to their screen adaptations. Catch up with Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, The Dark Tower vol 1 — The Gunslinger by Stephen King, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, and A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin vs Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki.
Coming up: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft (vs the bonkers Nicholas Cage adap.) and Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones.
Never Let Me Go: the story
I don’t usually give a detailed synopsis, but this critique requires it, so skip on if you want to avoid spoilers.
In the 1950s, human cloning is established for the purpose of supplying live organ donors. In the 1990s, the narrator Kathy H is a carer who looks after organ donors until they ‘complete’ — a euphemism for dying as their organs are removed. She looks back on her childhood at Hailsham, a boarding school for innocent young clones.
The students are taught to live healthy lives and receive a basic education from teachers known as Guardians. They don’t know about their fate, and their lessons include role-playing for adult lives in the outside world. The Guardians encourage them to create art for a visitor known as Madame, who selects pieces for her gallery. Kathy develops close friendships with two students: Ruth and Tommy. Other students bully Tommy because of his strange art and comically short temper, but Kathy’s friendship helps him to control his temper. Kathy develops a crush but she’s disappointed when Ruth and Tommy form a relationship. This lasts throughout their youth, but the trio remain friends.
The students are allowed to buy goods from the outside world at events called ‘the exchanges’. Teenage Kathy acquires a cassette tape that includes a saccharine ballad: Never Let Me Go. She often dances to it while alone, and on one occasion she notices the headmistress, Miss Emily, watching her.
When a sympathetic new Guardian arrives, she tells the students that they were created to be organ donors. Miss Lucy is swiftly removed from the school.
The world beyond
At 16, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy move to the Cottages, a former farm. They meet other clones and can visit the outside world. They mostly stay together, play games, walk in the countryside and have sex. Two older housemates invite Ruth on a trip to Cromer in Norfolk, where they have seen a woman who might be her ‘possible’. The clones have developed a myth about finding the people from whom they were copied, but the woman looks only superficially like Ruth. Afterwards, she angrily confesses her fear that they were all cloned from ‘human trash’.
The older housemates reveal that they’ve heard a rumour about Hailsham students: any couple who can prove they are in love can apply for a deferral of their donations. The Hailsham students don’t know anything about deferrals, but the rumour lives on.
Ruth goes off with the other housemates, so Kathy and Tommy visit second hand shops around Cromer, looking for a copy of the tape with Never Let Me Go, which Kathy has lost. They find the tape and he buys it for Kathy, giving away his affection for her. They agree not to tell Ruth about the tape, and Tommy suggests that the Madame’s gallery was to reveal their souls if they ever ask for a deferral. Tommy’s scared that he never produced any art that Madame liked.
When Ruth finds out about the tape, she becomes jealous. She spitefully tells Kathy that Tommy could never find her attractive because she’s had sex with too many other men. Kathy applies to become a carer so that she can leave the Cottages, and loses contact with her friends.
Til death us do part
Some 10 years later, Kathy accidentally encounters Ruth after her first donation and in deteriorating health. She becomes her carer and they reunite with Tommy, who has made two donations but is still in good health. Ruth confesses her regret for keeping Kathy and Tommy apart, and offers to make amends by giving them Madame’s address so that they can apply for a deferral. Soon after, Ruth makes her second donation and completes. Kathy becomes Tommy’s carer and lover.
They visit the Madame and find Miss Emily with her. The older women reveal that Hailsham was an experiment to convince people that clones are normal humans with a soul, who deserve better treatment. Nobody cared, Hailsham closed and clones are now treated worse than before. Deferrals were always a myth.
Tommy’s childhood temper returns and he berates Kathy for working as a carer. She resigns as his carer but visits before he completes at his third donation. The novel ends with Kathy in Norfolk, reminiscing about her life and the friends she has lost. Her donations will come soon.
Never Let Me Go: a writer’s review
There are two stories in Never Let Me Go: a strong love triangle and a weak alternative history.
The love triangle between Kathy, Tommy and Ruth could exist in any number of isolated mundane settings. It’s not an original love story: Ruth is a stereotypical mean girl frenemy, Kathy is weak and depends on her friend, while Tommy bounces like a puppy to whoever offers him the most affection.
The dystopian SF elements are irrelevant to this triangle. Ruth’s jealousy could force them apart in any circumstance and the pressure which brings them together could be any illness.
Ishiguro’s prose is beautiful, and it’s the secret sauce that makes his novel readable despite its multiple failures. Hailsham is a fascinating environment: the exchanges, the rumours of a terrifying world beyond the gates, Madame’s gallery and the detached caring of the Guardians set up an introduction to a fascinating world.
Yet it feels like Ishiguro is far more invested in Hailsham than the rest of his world. His notion of England and the English character appears to be rooted in a monotone postwar sensibility. It’s out of time and out of place.
Alt history, without the alt
Alternative history is like throwing a pebble into the pond of time and seeing how the ripples spread out. Ishiguro’s alt-history isn’t weak because it fails to explain how the cloning-donor technology works, although when he stumbles into the science, he fails hard. It’s weak because of a basic inattention to the social and human effects of the world he creates. In this two-dimensional history, society is utterly unchanged by the existence of clones or an endless supply of acquiescent donors.
There are ways to get around this. Isolating the narrator from society is the easiest, and that’s why the Hailsham section works far better than the second and third acts in the outside world. If you acknowledge the implications of your world, it’s both possible and often necessary to hand-wave some of them away with cursory explanations. Ishiguro barely attempts this level of plausibility.
The most difficult route is to follow the ripples. As time moves away from your initial change, they will bounce off the real world and interact with each other. Most authors choose to follow the ripples that interest them and hand-wave the rest, but for Ishiguro, the world is a static setting of no consequence. His protagonists aren’t isolated from the world; they’re simply unaffected by anything beyond their tiny bubble.
Harvest-friendly humans
This bizarre lack of affect infects everyone.
Miss Lucy tells a class full of teenagers that they will be harvested for their organs. No one cries. No one is angry. No one is scared.
Ruth almost meets her Possible, and when it turns into a false hope she’s briefly angry that she might have come from “human trash”. This revelation doesn’t seem to go anywhere except mistreating her best friend. When their lovestruck housemates in the Cottages learn that deferrals are just another rumour, they shrug and fade into the background, narrative function completed.
As a carer, Kathy watches her donors experience slow, painful vivisection, and it makes her a bit sad, but never enough to question the programme. When Tommy discovers that the deferrals are a myth, his anger flares and evaporates before he submits to harvesting.
Death becomes them
The donors’ acquiescence confused the hell out of me. History shows you can make people do terrible things to each other and to themselves. Yet Ishiguro makes no attempt to show how his donors become so willing to die or why they never question their fate.
They’re not coerced, brainwashed, bullied, indoctrinated, terrorised or emotionally manipulated. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why they would agree to have their organs removed, again and again. No one in the wider world seems grateful for this sacrifice, or even aware of it.
It’s like 1984 without the Three Minute Hate, the Big Brother cult, the ubiquitous surveillance or the constant rewriting of history. Even Madame and Miss Emily, when they reveal the failure of their Hailsham experiment, don’t seem horrified by the world they live in. Kathy and Tommy’s arrival is an inconvenience to Madame’s imminent furniture delivery, and her sickness hints that she’s likely to benefit from the donor system.
Kathy: the angel of death
Kathy is an even more contradictory and unsympathetic creation. After the donors learn that they’re incapable of having children, the titular song inspires a moment of teenage wistfulness and desire for motherhood. This never goes anywhere, unless her maternal instinct sublimes into her success as a carer — but Isiguro never makes the connection.
This is a classic opportunity for an SF analogy to contemporary social questions. These women (and men) are denied basic reproductive rights, but it never earns a second thought.
As a carer, Kathy spends her life ensuring that the system extracts maximum value from the donors with the least trouble. She’s an angel of death at best, at worst she’s a Holocaust internee volunteering to help Dr Mengele. Her actions make her far more evil than Ruth’s petty jealousy.
Never let Me Go has been described as a horror story, but Ishiguro hews too tightly to the euphemisms of ‘donation’ and ‘completion’. Kathy never describes the suffering of her donors, even when they’re her own friends and lovers. I came to assume that what actually made her suitable as a carer was a psychopathic lack of affect.
Kathy completes the novel with lines of philosophy so vacuous that they can’t be taken at face value. They only make sense as evidence of someone incapable of comprehending the level to which she has been abused by the state.
“We should run away and live free.” “Sorry, can’t, I’ve got an appointment to be murdered tomorrow and it would be rude to cancel at short notice.”
Don’t mention the facts
As for the world beyond its protagonists, Ishiguro’s attempt to dismiss it is laughably bad. I referenced the Holocaust because the alternative history in this story begins in the shadow of that atrocity. The West was generally against large scale human slaughter for a few decades after World War 2 but in this history, Britain has industrialised murder without any of those nasty concentration camps.
It doesn’t feel unreasonable to wonder how religions or other nations have reacted to the British cloning programme. There’s a fleeting mention of debate around cloning and souls, but Ishiguro shies from it as though philosophy might dirty his pages.
Ishiguro said that he wanted cloning in this history to have the impact that nuclear power has had in our own. Yet it’s had no apparent effect, for better or worse. There’s no equivalent of Greenpeace or CND. All debate has been settled. Clones are useful, disposable unpeople, but at the same time the people whose lives have been saved don’t seem any happier for it.
When Madame and Miss Emily reference the ailments that the donor programme has banished, it’s almost as if Ishiguro is trolling any reader with a morsel of medical knowledge. Motor neurone disease is a progressive illness that would require whole brain transplants. Cancer is notoriously cancerous and the challenge isn’t transplants, it’s metastasis.
It’s all about the feels
Fans of this novel might object that it’s about “the feels” of its insipid protagonists. Even their emotions seem entirely separated from their existence, as though they’re in a different story.
Never Let Me Go stayed with me, but in the worst way possible. There’s far more humanity in Philip K Dick’s doomed replicants and better worldbuilding in thirty seconds of Monty Python’s live organ donor sketch.
Ishiguro might claim that he wrote a novel about cloning, but he didn’t. Science aside, he deals competently with neither the social nor the personal implications of his alternative history.
Never Let Me Go is an insult to every literary dystopian who has not flinched at the consequences of their creations: Mary Shelley, EM Forster, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Daniel Keyes, Philip K Dick, Margaret Atwood, Colson Whitehead and Charlie Brooker to name a few.
There is a good story in here, but Kazuo Ishiguro did not deliver it. And he should be able to deliver. Remains Of The Day is all about a man so bound by society and his upbringing that denies himself happiness. Those pressures surround the protagonists of Never Let Me Go, but they never emerge to fulfil the promise of the premise.
I’m aware that this is a dissenting opinion on a text which is highly-regarded among the literati. I was relieved to discover that Christopher Priest, author of The Prestige, found a similar failure to deliver in Ishiguro’s novel about AI, Klara and the Sun.
Never Let Me Go: the film
Alex Garland’s script follows the original story, but it’s aware of the novel’s shortcomings and makes some attempts to address them in its depiction of the donors’ lives.
The children at Hailsham are shown taking drugs which might plausibly affect their behaviour, and the donors have to tap some sort of implanted tag when they enter and leave their homes. The exchanges are full of broken toys instead of luxuries, and their clothes at the Cottages are all second-hand. An elderly couple in Cromer look at the clones as though they shouldn’t be seen in public.
The visual medium gives director Mark Romanek no way to avoid the ugliness of the donation process, and we witness donors with missing eyes and huge scars, debilitated and struggling after their organs are harvested. Kiera Knightley brings a fragility to Ruth’s bitchiness, Carey Mulligan’s emotional detachment is suitably psychotic and Andrew Garfield is a perfectly puppyish and temperamental Tommy.
Unfortunately, the film can’t paper over the fundamental flaws of the novel with a beautiful cast and homely Englishness. Tommy’s energy makes his ultimate acceptance of being murdered for his organs even more difficult to accept. The scene with a washed-up boat only highlights how unlikely it is that they never consider running away.
Casting Irish actors as the lovestruck housemates at the Cottages only reminded me of the world beyond this myopic story, and that no matter how great the tyranny, people will always resist or escape.
What’s better, book or film? The film is lifted to victory by Garland’s attempts to paper over some of the book’s fundamental flaws.
The Book Corner season 5, episode 6: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel The Lovely Bones recounts a horrific murder and its consequences from the victim’s perspective. Peter Jackson took on the challenge of adapting it for his 2009 movie, with a heavyweight cast including Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon.
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Most book reviewers do it to share their opinions. As a writer, I want to discover what I think about the craft so that I can improve. That’s where the Book Corner comes in.
Book reviewers usually cover new releases and classics (because the algorithms love a classic). My selections are governed by the whims of the Book Corner, which is selected by my peers in a regular writing group.
The Book Corner
The Book Corner began as a response to the reading list for the Creative Writing MA that I completed in 2021. The class had a mixed response to the ten novels we read across a year. After graduating, we thought it would be fun to keep on reading together as well as writing.
Once a month, we take a break from the Poo Vortex of critiquing our own work, enter the Book Corner and criticise published works. The goal is explore them as examples of writing for our own work, and discover how we react to them.
The first season of Book Corner was an alternative reading list of contemporary novels for an MA group. The second drew on our TBR lists. Someday, I should get around to reviewing at least a few of them.
Titles included Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name Of The Wind, two Iain (M) Banks novels (The Business and Surface Detail), VE Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic, Everything Under by Daisy Johnson, The World According To Garp by John Irving, The Sellout by Paul Beatty, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Chuck Palahniuk’s Damned, Himself by Jess Kidd, and A History Of The World In 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes.
From reader to reviewer
The third season of the Book Corner covered recent winners of literary awards for genre fiction. The selection ranged from history to horror, and coincided with the launch of my website. Ever-hungry for content I caught up, with a post on the quirks of award-winning genre fiction. As I wrote, I began to sniff out something about the qualities I value in creative writing.
The fourth season embraced a nebulous concept of novels that we wanted to re-read with the group. The list covered, covering almost a century of writing from John Steinbeck through Kurt Vonnegut to Naomi Alderman. I graduated from a single post to three roundups, and with season five I’ve taken on a post for every novel.
The latest season compares novels with their film adaptations. So far, it’s included Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Over four seasons, I’ve enjoyed most of the novels my fellow writers have selected and I’ve been delighted by several. A few have left me unexpectedly disappointed, underwhelmed or nonplussed. One made me so angry that I’m still unsettled at my response. As I’ve reviewed them in increasing detail, I’ve also had to think about the qualities which I value as a reader and a writer.
Reading as a writer*
One of the opening gambits of my MA at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, was teaching us to read as writers. When you come to a novel as a reader, you’re usually reading for pleasure. Your only hope is that you’ll enjoy the novel.
Every reader rates a novel by placing different weights on the scales of their tastes. Literary readers value language, technique, character and theme above story, world and ideas. Fantasy and science fiction readers tend to weight their preferences in the opposite direction.
Fans of romance, western, thriller and horror are drawn to the formal structure inherent in their genres. Characters matter, but they value the story most on its ability to deliver the beats they expect. Historical fiction readers tend towards literary ideals, but their favourites must also deliver an authentic slice of their period setting.
Not every reader is a genre purist, and some people value writing that reaches creatively across genres. Literary readers tend to think of themselves as above genre.
Reading as a writer is sometimes reduced to examining language in forensic detail. This is absolutely useful to uncover how different genres use language. It’s also a useful for tool for separating the readerly notion of taste from a broader question of quality. However, it’s as important to focus on the big picture as it is to examine the contributions of the copy-editor and proof reader.
Taste, quality and success
For me, reading as a writer looks at how an author employs the different elements of our authorial toolkit. I try to see how well they deliver on the values of the genre.
Everyone will have a different description of what success looks like. I’m a fan of John Gardner’s notion that a storyteller must deliver the experience of a continuous waking dream. Anything which interrupts that dream signifies a failure, although there are exceptions.
I look foward to writing that is so profound that I have to stop and think about it. Great books can use language so challenging that you need a couple of read-throughs. The writer’s aim is not to wake the reader from their immersion in the experience. If they want to throw your book across the room, you’ve definitely failed.
You can analyse an author’s techniques at microscopic, macroscopic and meta levels.
The microscopic level covers language, style, metre and dialogue. I look specifically at opening lines, the voices of the narrator and their characters, and the eternally-debated balance of “show vs tell”. The macroscopic level concerns structure and rhythm. I’m interested in how they function on the level of the chapter and the entire novel, if they conform to or subvert formulas like the Hero’s Journey, and the depth of characterisation. Last but far from least, on the meta level, theme emerges and elements like symbols motifs become significant.
Most writers also agree that there some fundamentals that reach across genres. These include consistency of style, the voice of the author, and delivering the promise of the premise (even literary fiction has to do this).
The mundane and the fantastic
As a writer, I’ve begun to see literature, readers and writers falling into two camps: the mundane and the fantastic. (I could write a whole post on this and I’m not even sure it’s an original notion.)
They’re not discrete categories, but literary success and failure often result from writers straying too far from home. Often, mundane readers are uncomfortable with the fantastic and fantastic readers are underwhelmed by the mundane. Writers, too.
Mundane isn’t an insult. It describes a world of everyday concerns, where characters and events are things that you could confidently encounter at your front door, in the news or the pages of a history book.
Mundanity is constructed of things which neither the reader nor the writer needs a great deal of imagination to conjure. Crucially, both sides of the experience are comfortable in that space. Works of crime, westerns, romance, historical and literary fiction are typically mundane.
The fantastic: commit or fail
The fantastic requires a writer to imagine something which is not in the everyday world. In the fantastic mode, both readers and writers enjoy exercising their imaginations. The fantastic element might be very small, but chaos theory teaches us that even small changes can have dramatic effects.
Ghost stories typically introduce the fantastic into a mundane setting with terrifying impact. Magical realism is a precise, subtle application of the fantastic to mundane settings. Science fiction and fantasy can operate within the mundane, or eschew it for entirely imagined worlds.
Whatever the degree, a fantastic writer must be willing and able to execute those changes for their entire world. Literary failure results when writers of the mundane take a fantastic premise on which they are unwilling or unable to commit.
There’s nothing wrong with using the fantastic as a device of the mundane, revealed as trickery, imagination, mental illness or hallucination (even if it’s sometimes a cliché). However, if a writer decides that the world has been fundamentally changed by their premise, refusing to explore those changes and how they affect your characters represents a gross failure of storytelling art.
The Book Corner continues
And if fiction is anything, it is the art of telling stories, mundane or fantastic. As a reader and a writer, I simply find the fantastic more satisfying.
Mundane fiction sometimes feels like it engages only half of my mind because my imagination is ticking over. I won’t deny that historical fiction or an unsolved mystery can be as transporting as any space opera. Original and engaging characters can exist in any setting, and the most successful mundane literature exceeds its quotidian trappings to become fantastic.
The final works of the book vs film season will be The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft and Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones. I’m hoping for fantastic results.
* Reading As A Writer is, ironically, the title of a book on the topic which I found neither helpful nor entertaining.
Cover image: NASABooks image: Svetlana Buzmakova/Shutterstock