Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

'I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond doubt there's nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can't excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn't know better. That's how Capaldi sees it, and there's a part of me that fears he's right.'

Klara is an Artificial Friend, model B2. She begins her life sitting in a shop, chatting with other AFs, hoping that the Manager will rotate her into the window where she will be seen by a boy or girl, chosen, purchased. For an AF, she is observant: from her vantage point in the store window, she notices much about the people who walk by, perceiving their attitudes and desires by their body language and physical appearance. She gets her wish one day when a girl named Josie appears with her mother to buy her and take her to their house in what seems to be the Hudson Valley.

The home Klara enters is one marked by turmoil. Josie, we learn, is very sick thanks to a botched gene editing operation. Her next door neighbor and boyfriend, Rick, is one of the few kids in this world who have not been "lifted" as Josie has, but both suffer the consequences of their parents' choices: Rick's future is drastically narrowed by a culture that denies opportunities to "unlifted" children, and Josie may ultimately die of the flaw introduced in her genes, as her older sister did. Josie's father, who lives back in the city, is what is called "post-employed," having been replaced in his job as an engineer by the exact kind of AI that Klara represents. Klara, then, represents both a problem and its would-be solution; technocapitalism has produced a system of increasing inequality and alienation, but so too has it provided the disaffected with a dubious kind of companionship.

In the store, it's explained to Klara that she gets her energy from the sun--that is, she's solar-powered. On cloudy days, she can sense herself becoming weaker, and she mistakenly generalizes this understanding to Josie, too. She begins to believe that, if only the Sun can be appeased, he will provide Josie with his "special nourishment," reenergizing her and bringing her back to health. It's in this way that Klara resembles Ishiguro's other narrators, all of whom live under misunderstandings they perpetuate at an unconscious level. Here it's one of the novel's greatest flaws. It's difficult to believe that Klara--whom we're asked to believe is especially perceptive, for an AF--sustains this childish misunderstanding for so long. When she runs off to a barn on the western end of the family property, where the sun sets every night, we recognize her pleading and bargaining as a form of prayer.

On a trip back to the city, Josie's mom reveals--spoiler! spoiler!--that a "portrait" she has commissioned of Josie is actually an animatronic facsimile, and she intends, if Josie were to die, to ask Klara to take her place inside this body. The implications of this request are deeply troubling. Personhood and personality--are these things that can be "learned" through observation? If observant Klara watches Josie close enough, will she really be able to "continue" her after her death? It seems obvious that the answer is no, but there's a critique here of artificial intelligence, and the possibilities for it of which we dream. It's foolish, Ishiguro suggests, to think that we can build machines to approximate ourselves. Yet, this reveals the novel's central flaw, I think: it makes this critique while narrating from the position of artificially intelligent Klara, whose credibility and sympathy make her so very human. 

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

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 that 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 deliverymen joke and laugh with you and call you "sweetheart."

I've read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Again again to teach it again.  Once I taught it to a 12th grade AP Literature class; now to a group of talented and intelligent freshmen.  The age gap is a big one, I suppose, but the language in Ishiguro's novel is clear, conversational, relatable; I'm not worried about it being beyond their grasp intellectually.  But I do wonder about the age difference when it comes to maturity.  A senior is looking out into the future, into the world of college or work, and perhaps can understand something fundamental about the anxiety about growing up into a dangerous world that Never Let Me Go expresses.  A freshmen has made it, they've got their foot in the door and the change--triumphant or traumatic--is, in some sense, behind them.  For now.

The first time I read Never Let Me Go, I wanted to read it purely as a coming of age parable, as a universal narrative.  The students at the boarding school Hailsham--and you really shouldn't finish this sentence if you haven't read it--are clones, sure, destined to give up their vital organs so that others can be cured of terminal disease.  But are they so different than the rest of us, grappling with a future in which the only thing certain is death?  I always wanted to read that as the central irony of the novel; we yearn for Tommy, Kathy, and Ruth to fight against their fate, but we too are captives to a fate that cannot be fought.

Reading it now I'm much more prone to see the elements of privilege and class that make Never Let Me Go decidedly not a universal story.  Though the novel does much to erase them--that's Ishiguro's main trick, repression--there are people here who live vastly different lives than the student clones, and whose entire well-being is predicated on the clones' suffering and dying.  Read this way, Never Let Me Go brings to mind all the ways in which a global underclass suffers and dies for the comfort of the few, in sweatshops, in lithium mines, in hunger and in poverty.  Read this way, the proper response to Never Let Me Go is not sadness or wistfulness but rage.

There are glimpses of that rage at the beginning of the book.  As a kid, Tommy is known for his short temper and his blind, furious screaming sessions.  It takes very little to set him off, and he's widely disliked for it (though Kathy sees more or less past his bad reputation).  The anger is socialized out of him as he grows up, developing healthy relationships with Kathy and Ruth, and with the guardians at the school.  But anger is exactly what's required in the face of a great injustice, and instead the guardians divert Tommy's energy into ill-fated attempts at creativity.  Instead of shouting, he draws minutely detailed animals in his notebook, hoping they will prove something about him.  (The clones mistakenly believe that what they will prove is that he and Kathy are in love, which will be rewarded by a brief deferral of his "donations"; what they are really meant to prove is that he has a soul at all.)  One of the novel's final scenes, in which Tommy and Kathy, after failing in their milquetoast attempts to confront Hailsham's former headmistress, has Tommy making a primal scream in the woods.  All that repressed anger returns, but there's no longer the possibility of a useful outlet for it.  After all, Tommy's already made two donations.

The other thing I'm noticing for the first time is this: it's a strange thing to represent an abused underclass with the literary vocabulary of the boarding school novel.  The ostensible privilege of a place like Hailsham works to obscure the grisly nature of what is done to the clones.  You might react by indicting Ishiguro.  If you want to depict the underclass, you might say, go write a novel about a Pakistani immigrant or something, not a stuffy English boarding school.  But you might also say that Hailsham is a literal false consciousness, an ideology used to repress the reality of class-based oppression.  And in fact, Hailsham's legacy causes class fractures among the clones: among their friends at The Cottages, a kind of clone halfway house, being a Hailsham student indicates a kind of privilege.  Hailsham students, a "veteran" asserts, must know about the possibility of deferring donations; they have that kind of secret access.  False consciousness pits members against the underclass against each other to keep them from confronting, or even seeing, their real oppressors.

So what is Hailsham, exactly?  Kathy never wavers from her nostalgia for it, and it's easy to see why.  In a brief, painful, and constrained life, it offered companionship, care, education.  That's exactly what the headmistress, Miss Emily says, when Tommy and Kathy confront her at the end.  Hailsham, Miss Emily explains, was founded to prove to the outside world that clones were real people and deserved better treatment.  To that end--they provided better treatment, for some--they were successful, though the public side of their campaign was a failure.  This conversation is well-wrought and complex; you really do find yourself wondering whether Miss Emily is right.

But Hailsham reads to me now as an image of moderate pragmatism and its failures.  Think of the choice, perhaps, between advocating for better prison conditions and prison abolition.  Yes, the abolition of prisons seems like a pipe dream, but when does the pragmatic approach--by sealing off from the left the question of whether we should have prisons at all--collude with the imprisoners?  Miss Emily, in this scene, is confined to a wheelchair, but she hints at the fact that she hopes to be able to walk again soon.  Does Miss Emily tell herself, as she tells Kathy and Tommy, that she's proud of the difference she made in their lives as she's off to the clinic to receive her brand new clone-grown spleen?

That's when Tommy goes off and yells in the woods.  You wish he'd gone off and screamed in Miss Emily's face.  I do, at least, and the more I re-read the novel, my anger only grows.  But there's plenty to be angry about in the here and now, and plenty of screaming wasted.

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

If one has failed only where others have not had the courage or will to try, there is a consolation--indeed, a deep satisfaction--to be gained from the observation when looking back over one's life.

Masuji Ono is a painter.  Once, he was devoted to depicting the "floating world"--life in the pleasure districts of drinking establishments and prostitutes, which have a kind of transitory beauty.  He worked in the tradition of ukiyo-e, the 19th-century woodblock prints, whose name translates literally to "floating world."  But such an artistic tradition began to lose its relevance for Ono in the reality of pre-war Japan, and he committed himself to producing propaganda art for the Imperial cause.  Now, after the surrender, the older Ono looks back with nostalgia on the floating world that he's lost and reconciling himself to the new Japan.

Post-war Japan is not a friendly place for those who were high in the Imperial cause.  Many commit suicide as a public show of expiation for leading the country into such a costly war.  Ono's daughter Noriko seems to worry that his reputation will ultimately sink the marriage that is being arranged for her, and encourages him to seek out his old associates before her fiance's detective does.  (This seems like a common arrangement; Ono has a detective of his own.)  But there are those, like Ono's old student, Kuroda, who don't wish to see him, for deeds that Ono--and Ishiguro--keep at arm's length.

This weekend was the anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  (It made me think about the horrific scene describing the blast in Joy Kogawa's Obasan.)  Reading about the bombings again provided an interesting context to An Artist of the Floating World, which seeks to capture something about the state of mind of the Japanese at World War II.  The atomic bombs are not mentioned, but traditional bombing has taken a heavy, heavy toll on the country.  Ono's own wife, we learn, was killed in their home by a bomb, and many of the establishments of the old "floating world" are now rubble.  But buildings are also rising, many in a new Western style.  Ono himself finds some of these places bewildering, and his inability to adapt to the new way is underscored humorously by his conversations with his grandson, Ichiro, who would rather pretend to be the Lone Ranger than a samurai.  The turn away from militarism and imperialism requires a purge of the old guard, it needs it suicides, and though Ono finds such actions foolish, he recognizes in their actions a reflection of himself.

What Ono recognizes and understands, and what he doesn't, are the heart of An Artist of the Floating World.  Ishiguro really is the maestro of the unreliable narrator, and in a lot of ways Ono seems like a practice run at the character of the butler in The Remains of the Day, who refuses to recognize that his employer was a Nazi collaborator.  A Briton of Japanese background, Ishiguro seems to offer a kind of parallel between Japanese and British styles of repression.  Stevens the butler hides behind a kind of mannered, class-oriented sense of "dignity" that isn't so different from the Japanese style of polite avoidance practiced by Ono's daughters.  Confrontations, such as they are, are made only obliquely, and couched in equivocating language--forgive me, perhaps, etc.--that makes an honest assessment of reality difficult for the reader.

Ono himself is comparatively forthright, and considers himself to be making an honest assessment of his own position.  But a performative forthrightness can itself be a kind of denial.  Yes, Ono admits that the imperialist fervor was a mistake, but what are his mistakes?  He professes ignorance as to why his old student Kuroda might not wish to see him and only late in the novel, as if pushed back into a mental closet, that Ono reported Kuroda for "unpatriotic" sympathies.  Ono's admission that he has slightly less influence than he did before the war, but how much burden is put on the word "slightly?"  When describing his paintings, why does he focus on their aesthetic qualities, rather than their propagandistic content?  Ishiguro, as always, does a terrific job preventing the reader from getting to an objective truth, leaving us only with a sense that Ono's version is not quite right.

There's a final reveal that I admit I didn't see coming.  I'll say "spoiler alert," even though that seems a weird term for a revelation that is entirely psychological, rather than plot-driven.  Ono's ultimate denial, it turns out, is that he never really mattered much in the first place.  As his daughter says:

Forgive me, but it is perhaps important to see things in a proper perspective.  Father painted some splendid pictures, and was no doubt most influential among other painters.  But Father's work had hardly to do with these larger matters of which we are speaking.  He must stop believing he has done some great wrong.

It's so subtle, but it really turns everything on its head.  Ono isn't a powerful man whose equivocations prevent him from dealing with his misdeeds, he's an ordinary man whose equivocations actually serve to make him feel more important than he really was.  He thinks of himself as being the same kind of person as those who have committed suicides of honor, but these thoughts inflate his importance.  His misdeeds--like his reporting of Kuroda--are small and petty acts, personal betrayals, not national ones.  As his friend, the fellow traveler Matsuda tells him, "It was simply our misfortune to have been ordinary men during such times."  Ono believes there is a satisfaction in having done something great and failed, but most failures are only the ordinary kind, and that makes them somehow even more tragic.

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

Some of you will have fine monuments by which the living may remember the evil done to you.  Some of you will have only crude wooden crosses or painted rocks, while yet others of you must remain hidden in the shadows of history.  You are in any case part of an ancient procession, and so i is always possible the giant's cairn was erected to make the site of some such tragedy long ago when young innocents were slaughtered in war.  This aside, it is not easy to think of reasons for its standing.  One can see why on lower ground our ancestors might have wished to commemorate a victory or a king.  But why stack heavy stones to above a man's height in so high and remote a place as this?

Axl and Beatrice are old, at the end of what seems to have been a long and happy marriage.  But they are not happy in their village, so they set out to find the village where their son lives, having left long ago for reasons neither Axl or Beatrice can remember.  You see, there is a mist that hangs over Britain, a fog of forgetfulness, which separate Axl and Beatrice from much of their history.  At the fringes of their marital bliss are a number of disquieting questions: without their past, how can they be sure they really love each other?  And what is it, exactly, that everyone is trying to forget?

Ishiguro has always been interested in repression.  In Never Let Me Go, it's the way that the clones participate in their own murder and exploitation by repressing the question of whether things might be otherwise.  In The Remains of the Day, it's Stevens' refusal to recognize many truths about his life: his boss' Nazi sympathies, his father's frailty, his own deep love for Miss Kenton.  In each of those cases, Ishiguro is never glib enough to suggest that things would be better if everyone were honest with themselves; both the clones and Stevens seem to desperately need their delusions.  The truth, for Ishiguro, may set you free, but it seems just as likely to destroy you.

The same is true for Axl and Beatrice, and all the inhabitants of post-Arthurian Britain.  As their memories return, piece by piece, filled in with the help of those they meet along their journey, it becomes clear that the country was recently ravaged by war between the Saxons and the Britons.  Though Axl and Beatrice long for their memories to return so they might fully understand themselves, the lifting of the fog threatens to rekindle an old enmity:

"How right to fear it, sir," Wistan said.  "The giant, once well buried, now stirs.  When soon he rises,as surely he will, the friendly bonds between us will prove as knots young girls make with the stems of small flowers.  Men will burn their neighbours' houses by night.  Hang children from trees at dawn.  The rivers will stink with corpses bloated from their days of voyaging.  And even as they move on, our armies will grow larger, swollen by anger and thirst for vengeance.  For you Britons, it'll be as a ball of fire rolls towards you.  You'll flee or perish.  And country by country, this will become a new land, a Saxon land, with no more trace o your people's time here than a flock or two of sheep wandering the hills untended."

Would we be better of, Ishiguro wonders, if we were to rid ourselves of history?  Does peace require the eradication of what we remember?

These are rich and complex ideas.  But Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day succeed insofar as they rely on the accumulation of everyday detail; we believe those stories because we see reflected in them the way the minutiae of our lives can serve as a distraction from larger, deeper problems.  Ishiguro's plain prose is suited to those stories.  The Buried Giant, on the other hand, feels painted with much broader strokes.  Its characters only rarely seem like real people; rather, they read as the fantasy archetypes they are.  It is difficult to care about what Axl and Beatrice, much less all of Britain, may have repressed because The Buried Giant is not a story about repression but an allegory of repression.

Ishiguro recently got into a tiff with Ursula K. LeGuin, who accused him of not sufficiently respecting the fantasy genre.  LeGuin's charge goes too far, but it has a kernel of truth: Ishiguro seems to have no real idea of how to harness the possibilities of fantasy, or how to build a world which is specific and real.  The Buried Giant, I'm sad to say, reads exactly like what it is: a fantasy novel written by someone who never really reads fantasy novels.

And that's a shame, because it's clear that Ishiguro is developing ideas here that are part of an entire life's work.  The small, private repressions of his other novels are transformed into a national crisis, and you can see him thinking in a new way about the social, political, and historical aspects of repression.  But if he wanted to write a novel that comments on the way that repression works in the world, I'd rather have had a novel about the world as it is.

For what it's worth, Randy liked it better than I did.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

In a way, Never Let Me Go was written to be read twice. It maps the transition from childhood to adulthood--in particular, the childhoods of friends Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy at Hailsham, a kind of English boarding school--and if reading it once is like living through one's youth, compulsively guessing at what comes next, reading it a second time is like the process of memory, which recognizes the great ironies and sadnesses of such naivete. Ishiguro chooses to write in this second mode, as a series of reflections by a Kathy in her late twenties. Though it may seem silly, my sympathy for her increased since we were both, in a sense, going through the events of the book for the second time. And while knowing its "big secrets" deprived me of the satisfying shock of learning them, it rendered the characters' limited understanding of their own fate even more tragic.

For that reason, I think it's impossible to talk about this book without revealing its central mystery, so consider your self alerted for spoilers. At the time of her writing, Kathy is a "carer" who looks after "donors," and at first all we know is that she will become one herself, as Ruth and Tommy have. It's possible to unknot the scenario from that sentence alone, I think, but not its full limitations, and Ishiguro brilliantly metes out details in coffee spoons. At Hailsham, one teacher, Ms. Lucy, eventually drops the bombshell:

"If you're going to have a decent lives, then you've got to know and know properly. None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day. Your lives are set out for you. You'll become adults, then before you're old, before you're even middle-aged, you'll star to donate your vital organs. That's what each of you was created to do..."

But, as Ms. Lucy says, the students have been "told and not told." We, too, have been "told and not told," and by the time Ms. Lucy spells it out, we're not sure whether we knew it all along or not. This uncertainty is, on the level of pure craftsmanship, Ishiguro's greatest achievement.

But this realization only brings more questions: What, for instance, is the purpose of the "Gallery," where Hailsham's mysterious director "Madame" takes the best of the students' artwork? Later, when Kathy cares for Tommy during his donation period, bringing out a long-gestating romance, they decide to act on rumors that former Hailsham students can receive a deferral from their donations if they can prove they're in love. The Gallery, they posit, allows the powers-that-be to look into their souls and determine if their love is genuine.

But, as the old headmaster tells them, the purpose of the Gallery was to prove that they "had souls at all." They were proof that, like "normal" people, the donors could be creative, and served in a long publicity war to establish humane homes--like Hailsham--for future donors. This floors Kathy and Tommy, and us, for whom the uncertainty seems absurd. They do what other humans do: They fall in love; they have squabbles petty and serious; they have sex; they desire independence; they create; they sell; they buy; they betray each other; they try vainly to make sense of the order of their own lives--how could they be less than human, and not have souls? I said in my previous review that Never Let Me Go asks what it means to be human, but now I see that simply to ask the question is devastatingly offensive. Kathy and Tommy are put somewhat in Shylock's position. Though they want desperately to establish human rights to love and independence, they find themselves having to earn the simple right to be human at all.

I think now that Never Let Me Go asks other questions. One is, Is it better to know or to not know? Part of Hailsham's "humane" task is to shield its students from the essential bleakness of their futures, and to give them a childhood. Ishiguro strongly suggests that denying the students' full knowledge of their own lives is a contradiction, in that it denies them also the human right to face life with their own faculties. But there is also the campfire story of the girl whose ghost roams the Hailsham woods, yearning to get back in, as Kathy yearns to recapture a more idyllic childhood.

Another is What is the proper response to injustice? In the hands of a hack writer, Kathy and Tommy would be Katniss Everdeens, raging against the machine that confines them. The sequel (Still Never Letting Go) would be all about the rebellion they lead. But they choose instead to live quiet lives, making the best of the raw deal they have been given, and confirm their humanity once again by doing so. Kathy's lack of a sense of injustice is frustrating, but it is also familiar: who among us expends any real effort to correct the (admittedly slighter) cruelties of our own social order, when it takes so much effort simply to be human?

And, in turn, does that reticence support the mission of Hailsham, which says that if we cannot eliminate injustice, we should at least approach it in comfort and dignity? Though I am still unsure if the ministers of Hailsham take the right task, at least they engage in the right questions.

Okay. I'm tired of re-reading books. Half of them I've read this year have been re-reads--mostly because of teaching them in class--but I'm done with all that. The next review, I promise, will be something new.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Chris reviewed this book much earlier in the year and gave a very good summary of the plot. Rather than type it out again, you can just read his. His writeup and mine both have major spoilers so read on at your own risk if you ever intend to read this book.

Here's a very brief, spoilerific summary: Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were all students at Hailsham, a boarding school where children are raised to eventually be harvested for their organs. It's set at some indeterminate time in the future, although there's nothing particularly futuristic about the actual story.

One interesting thing to me was the way the story was constructed. Throughout, there's never really any huge reveal. Ishiguro drops hints about the childrens' ultimate fate so that nothing that happens in the book really blindsides the reader (with the possible exception of the very end). In most novels, this would seriously undercut the dramatic tension, but in Never Let Me Go, it serves to ratchet it up, making the book more of a tense journey to an inevitable, foretold destination than a thrill ride to an unexpected conclusion. Because of this, my focus throughout the book was on the characters and the way they interacted with one another and I found it to be the most thought-provking aspect of the novel.

Unlike many books of this nature where the protagonists find out about an awful fate awaiting them and then fight it until their last breath, the characters in NLMG seem to, for the most part, accept their eventual fate. Until they are harvested, the subjects are caretakers of other donors, so they know exactly what will eventually happen to them, yet they've been indoctrinated throughout their lives that this is their ultimate destiny. Even Tommy and Kathy, who attempt to find a loophole, are blandly accepting once their last chance is finally shot down. It's just an interesting facet of human nature (and one that Christopher may have mentioned in his review) that people tend to adjust to just about any circumstances, given enough time.

The other thing worth noting is that the ending of the book is very affecting, maybe moreso than anything else I've read this year.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Even I am a bit surprised by the clip I've been moving through books; this is the fifth book I've read this month, which is only half over. I credit this to a.) choosing books that are short or easy to read, and b.) having a lot of dead time recently in the form of plane and car rides, and jury duty. In short, it's a combination of luck, effort, and strategy, none of which describe Brent's efforts to read War and Peace, the poor schmuck.

Kazuo Ishiguro won the Booker Prize for his novel The Remains of the Day, the story of a butler dealing in his old age with the fact that his employer during World War II had been a Nazi sympathizer. Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and appears on the Time list, but it's a completely different kind of book: a science fiction tale about cloning and organ farming.

It follows the lives of three youths, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, who are clones who will one day become "donors," which basically means their bodies will be harvested for their organs. Never Let Me Go is short on the details of this process, but it's not the kind of book that's interested in minute scientific details, only broad concepts and the way they affect the minutiae of human life. It is perfect in its scope, realizing that the most genuine way to analyze the social effects of its particular vision of the future is not through sweeping narratives about the history and development of the cloning culture, but through the everyday accounts of three people who wholly inhabit it. At first it is unclear how much the three and their friends, who reside at a private home for future donors, understand about the process, but as the details become clearer there is a surprisingly small amount of resistance to the program. The donors do not protest their lives, which must inevitably end in their 20's or 30's after they have "completed" their organ donations, because they are the only lives to know. It is almost as if it never occurs to them to protest--strange to say, but how true is this in our own lives? The clones live together throughout their adolescence, isolated; they know no other life.

A lesser author might have turned Never Let Me Go into a novel that beats you over the head with the "big picture." But at its heart it is about friendships, crushes, petty arguments, because it is about people and not concepts. The characters only consider questions like "what does it mean to be human?" in the periphery of their minds, as we all tend to do. Because of all this it is all the more powerful when, in the book's final chapters, Kathy and Tommy learn that in truth most outsiders have always reviled the clones and considered them something less than human, because Ishiguro paints his characters with all the creativity, pettiness, and inconsistency that we've come to expect from human beings.