In a writing workshop, a friend of mine once criticized Kazuo Ishiguro for his novel “Never Let Me Go,” which my friend claimed was a science fiction novel that refused to embrace its science fiction roots.
It’s true that the science fiction conceits in “Never Let Me Go” are largely glossed over. Most of the book focuses on the characters and their love for each other, not the details of cloning and organ transplants.
But I think that my friend was mistaken in his criticism. Shouldn’t we celebrate books that don’t fit neatly into genre categories? Why isn’t it possible to write a good novel that draws from genre conceits without fully embodying the genre’s conventions? And what’s wrong with a bit of subtlety when employing genre ideas?
Ishiguro’s novel “When We Were Orphans,” a lesser-known predecessor to the famous “Never Let Me Go,” hits genre notes in a similar fashion. Instead of science fiction, Orphans plays on detective tropes. The protagonist is a detective, although hardly a Sherlock Holmes archetype. He’s delusional, inflating his bumbling missteps into successes. The narrative doesn’t progress with the cause and effect sequence associated with most detective novels, though; it has the digressionary structure of a literary novel, floating through the narrator’s childhood memories in Proustian fashion.
“When We Were Orphans” has the genre connection to “Never Let Me Go,” but its far closer connection in Ishiguro’s oeuvre is “Remains of the Day.” Both have polite, formal, unreliable narrators who love a woman but find themselves unable to demonstrate that love, and WWII political overtones of a good person unwittingly in cahoots with evil.
It’s those unreliable narrators which every writer should admire. After reading Ishiguro’s first person POVs, it seems impossible that any first person narrator is telling the truth. Ishiguro exposes how the “I” of any story necessarily skews the world, which not only provides layers of mystique for the reader to interpret, it only creates a complex character. Who is this person and is he lying to me, to others, or only to himself? Ishiguro is a master of liars who do not know they are lying.
