Beyond Hailsham: "A Fantasy Land"

"This might all sound daft, but you have to remember that to us, at that stage in our lives, any place beyond Hailsham was like a fantasy land; we had only the haziest notions of the world outside and about what was and wasn't possible there" (Never Let Me Go, 66).

There's a structural thing in the chapters that's been bugging me (besides the sub-par grammar, I mean). The book, so far, has been based on a bunch of interconnected anecdotes and hasn't been one fluid story, which is fine. But every time Ishiguro introduces a new anecdote, he puts this at the end of the previous one: "And all of that changed the one time that [some person] and I [past tense activity]." Then, there's a line break and the next anecdote starts. I suppose it's nice that there's a pattern.

I'm not complaining about the anecdotes themselves, though. They're doing a good job of slowly creating a world about which I know very little but increasingly more.

I haven't decided yet if the world is a kind-of-utopia like in Brave New World. Miss Lucy's character has kind of been acting as a window into the secret world around the students -- apparently smoking for them was worse than smoking for her (68). Also, like in Brave New World, the characters can't have babies (73).

In Brave New World in your pants, the characters all knew about the mysterious world, and the reader was slowly introduced to it. I like the difference in Never Let Me Go in that we're kind of learning about the "fantasy land" at the same speed as the characters; it makes me feel more included in the book.