The Damned and the Beautiful

...They are given to understand that they are in some way special, and that Hailsham is an elite institution...

...A favorite topic in fiction is human durability, resistance, what people like to refer to as "the triumph of the human spirit...

...Just as the children have no last names, they have no families...

...At an age when most young people are preoccupied with sex—with where they came from, in other words—these children are more interested in their own genesis, that is, who their "possibles," their clone models, might be...

...These children have been created for a purpose, and they have no sense of their own independent being, or of any individual rights they might have...

...later, "donors...

...In effect, they are being farmed...

...We hated the way the guardians, usually so on top of everything, became so awkward whenever we came near this territory...

...Didn't we all dream from time to time about one guardian or other bending the rules and doing something special for us...

...On this level Saturday fails, somewhat, as a novel, while remaining fascinating and frequently brilliant as a meditation...

...Henry's reflections are so current and topical, his approach to the political moment so tortured, that it is impossible to detach Henry the character from McEwan the writer, however different their professions and lives might be...

...And instead of teachers they have "guardians," though their function seems to differ little from that of teachers...

...Even Henry's hospital has what he calls "'a new look" for the Emergency Plan: "Simple train crashes are no longer all that are envisaged, and words like "catastrophe' and 'mass fatalities,' 'chemical and biological warfare' and 'majorattack' have recently become bland through repetition.' There is no escaping from news, and fear, and ghoulish anticipation...

...I'm not sure what was going on in our heads during those discussions," Kathy admits...

...Ian McEwan's new novel, Saturday (Talese/Doubleday, 289 pp., $28.00), is not—but it is a very fine piece of work, like everything he writes...

...Having reached the far side of midlife, Henry has begun the downward journey...

...It's true," he responds...

...I don't remember anyone saying they were going to be a movie star or anything like that...

...The Remains of the Day, his Booker winner, was an exquisitely written and delicately felt work, but it might have been written by E.M...

...I honestly think I could be wrong.' McEwan takes us through Henry's Saturday, in which each incident, whether routine or extraordinary, serves to emphasize the essential beauty and happiness of Henry's life, and the transience of everything he touches: sex with his wife...

...His wife, Rosalind, is a barrister, his daughter Daisy an up-and-coming poet, his son Theo a blues musician...

...Like William Golding's work it provides both an encompassing metaphor for the human condition and a cautionary tale about the nature of the human animal...

...As donors—by which time they will be in their mid-20s—they will enter a clinic and submit to operations to remove various organs...

...Kathy's narrative tone, for all her youth, can only be described as autumnal...

...Ishiguro reveals their dreadful future at a poignant moment, after we have been drawn into the little circle of students and their doings through Kathy and her friends...

...They differ from ordinary children only in their vague awareness of what the future holds for them and in their resignation to it...

...The permeable boundaries between author and character give Saturday a distinctly autobiographical feeling and convey the impression that McEwan is, to a certain extent, hiding himself and his reflections behind a semitransparent fictional creation...

...Then there is the fact that Kathy, the narrator, never mentions anyone's parents...

...If a child is presented with a particular worldview as "normal," he or she generally accepts it...

...He curls his lip at the "cloying selfimportance" of the Not in My Name logo...

...Resignation is as human a characteristic as rebellion or rage...

...Above all, it is the students' quiet acceptance of their fate that breaks one's heart...

...The habit's grown stronger these past two years...

...It posits a social order, "More scientific, efficient, yes," in the words of one of its characters...

...Even Ruth, who in ordinary life would probably have aspired to become a supermodel or a captain of industry, settles for a dream future as an office worker in a provincial town...

...Correspondingly, there is an enhanced appreciation of what one has—mentally, physically, materially—at this high point in life, before decline has really set in...

...Kathy, Tommy, Ruth, and their friends enjoy more freedom than most schoolchildren, and they are encouraged to read, to write, to be "creative" in whatever way they can...

...Kathy's simple narrative is mesmerizing as we discover the rules and limits of her world along with her...

...This reading list persuaded Perowne that the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination___" Here, one suspects again, it is McEwan speaking rather than Henry...

...For 15 years he barely touched a nonmedical book at all...

...Kathy, for instance, realizes that many of her fellow students' mannerisms are copied from characters they saw on television, because they have no one else to emulate...

...Not until When We Were Orphans (2001) did Ishiguro begin to significantly distinguish himself from literary forebears and models...

...We probably knew they couldn't be serious, but then again, I'm sure we didn't regard them as fantasy either...

...less popular, because it so seldom makes for an uplifting story, is the flip side of human nature, its distressing tendency to be conditioned, brainwashed, even broken...

...Now that they are at the Cottages the students are fully aware of what lies in store for them, but they still fantasize about alternatives: Each of them has what they call a "dream future...

...when he argues with his daughter, a knee-jerk Bush-basher, he is a hawk...

...Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity...

...The word "die" is only used once in the novel, and specific organs to be donated are never—or almost never—referred to by name...

...She puzzles over Hailsham's emphasis on being creative and wonders why all the students' best artwork is taken away: It is, we leam much later, so that interested pedagogues can examine it in an attempt to discover whether these clones have "souls...

...The students, like their preceptors, stick with the accepted euphemisms...

...Having so little contact with "normals," or with adults of any sort, they live in a social vacuum...

...Henry feels the futility of obsessing about every newsbreak, but gives in to "the pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news...

...Most of the book takes place at Hailsham, a boarding school set in an idyllic corner of the English countryside...

...He received the 1989 Booker Prize, he is an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, and he is a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Artset des Lettres, among other honors...

...Not so long ago his thoughts ranged more unpredictably, over a longer list of subjects— His nerves, like tautened strings, vibrate obediently with each news 'release.' He's lost the habits of skepticism...

...On the other hand, he thinks he's seen enough death, fear, courage, and suffering to supply half a dozen literatures...

...When as teenagers the three move from Hailsham to a remote farm, "the Cottages," with other students, they have a bit more freedom to explore the world and begin to compare themselves with the "normals" they see on their travels...

...Accordingly, they focus their often pathetic longing for affection on these guardians, the only adults and role models they know...

...On that very Saturday, London is thronged with many thousands of people who have taken to the streets in the largest political protest the city has ever seen...

...Blix has been addressing the UN again...

...Indeed, they have none...

...As it is, the details that stay with the reader are the tiniest and most painful...

...The three children at the center of the narrative are of contrasting types...

...They have merely the very vaguest ideas about this future and are diffident about inquiring into it too aggressively...

...McEwan, it seems, has mellowed—or has simply begun, like his protagonist, to cherish every fleeting moment of what is in essence a wonderful life...

...England, along with the United States, is about to go to war against Iraq...

...Being myself exactly the same age, I recognized all the feelings and symptoms McEwan so cleverly communicates: The intimations, felt 10 years or so previously, that one just might possibly not live forever have developed into a cool certainty ofthat fact and even a grudging resignation...

...But we didn't really know what that meant...

...This is one of several items that stretch the reader's credulity a bit...

...Not only are the guardians frequently awkward around the students: Some of them seem to fear the children, shying instinctively away if they come too close...

...When he argues with his bellicose American anesthesiologist, he is a dove...

...He is at the summit of a successful career and an equally successful family life...

...The talk was more likely to be about becoming a postman or working on a farm...

...the secret of Hailsham, and of these children, is central to the book's life and is therefore not kept from the reader for very long...

...Coming from a mind as sharp as McEwan's, it tells us a great deal about that world, and about the middle-aged, male, bourgeois sensibility breathing it in...

...He is well aware that this obsession begets a new sort of mental poverty, a new sort of subjugation—a spiritual subjugation—to political authority and spin...

...He lives in a spacious house on a beautiful Robert Adam square in London's fashionable Fitzrovia neighborhood...

...We certainly knew—though not in any deep sense—that we were different from our guardians, and from the normal people outside...

...What will interest longtime readers of McEwan is how comparatively sunny a character this fictional alter ego is...

...The actual, not the magical, should be the challenge...

...Very good...

...Across the Atlantic, "the stolid Mr...

...Kathy also refers to the future beyond Hailsham, which for these children will be rather special...

...If Ishiguro had insisted on accentuating the violent or disgusting details of his story, the result might have been a mere shocker...

...A man who attempts to ease the miseries of failing minds by repairing brains is bound to respect the material world, its limits, and what it can sustain," Henry feels...

...They are for the most part typical children, with their petty rivalries, their foolish affections, their ridiculous fantasies about mundane people and events...

...Henry Perowne, who has become friendly with an Iraqi man tortured by Saddam's goons, is well aware that the "peace" the demonstrating sloganeers are promoting is, for the Iraqi nation, not very peaceful, and he is disgusted by the marchers' self-congratulatory moral smugness and their holiday gaiety...

...He is not, like his daughter Daisy, an intellectual, and his response to imaginative literature is limited...

...minor physical twinges and mental slips make one look nervously toward a future of infirmity, illness, the nursing home, and the grave...

...This is a period piece, an examination of one man's world at a specific moment in time, in this case the year 2003...

...McEwan, unlike the majority of British artists and intellectuals of his generation, has come out guardedly in favor of the Iraq war—at least once the invasion was irrevocably decided upon he hoped that it would succeed, unlike many on the Left who want President George W. Bush to fail at any cost...

...From the beginning, however, the reader is aware that Hailsham is not an ordinary school...

...As Kathy says, "Mind you, none of us pushed it too far...

...If we were keen to avoid certain topics, it was probably more because it embarrassed us...

...If they think—and they could be right—that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be somber in their view...

...The students are, it turns out, human clones brought into the world and raised to be organ donors...

...Daisy accuses him of not standing up for what he believes...

...we perhaps even knew that a long way down the road there were donations waiting for us...

...Life is beautiful, but violence lurks everywhere, and Henry, who spends every working day contemplating the fine line between life and death, intelligence and degeneration, never loses sight ofthat fact...

...That anyone might think they do not is as shocking to Kathy as it is to the reader...

...this novel proves it once again...

...In its unpretentious way, Ishiguro's novel is a masterpiece...

...It is completely hermetic, for one thing: The children never leave the school grounds at all...

...Hence his impatience with the magic realist novelists Daisy tries to foist on him: "What were these authors of reputation, grown men and women of the 20th century doing, granting supernatural powers to their characters...

...Forster...

...Never Let Me Go might be the best novel, so far, to address our current brave new world of scientific possibility, in which each day brings some startling and unprecedented moral conundrum to our burgeoning flock of bioethicists...

...a testosterone-driven squash game with his anesthesiologist...

...a violent encounter with a tormented thug...

...A spontaneous hug, a secret letter, a gift...

...But a harsh cruel world...

...There are televisions everywhere—at home, at the gym, in shop windows—as in The Manchurian Candidate...

...He loves his work, loves his family, and is still romantically in love with his wife—has in fact never desired another woman during the quarter century of their marriage...

...There are in this group no rebels, no runaways...

...Eventually, usually after the fourth "donation" or so, they will "complete...

...The novel's central character is Henry Perowne, a 48-yearold neurosurgeon...

...a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes...

...Yet it is only recently that he has come into his own, developing work that is truly personal both in style and subject...

...More cures for the old sicknesses...

...The city symbolizes the achievements and value of civilization: It is "a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece—millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work...

...What touches the reader, as it does throughout the book, is the modesty of their dreams...

...Ambivalence, in Henry's view, is the only logical response to such confusing events...

...McEwan, clearly, exercised a very conscious choice in making his hero a practical man, a materialist, rather than a thinker—the thinkers, he implies, have failed to comprehend this historical moment, with all its choices and implications...

...Never Let Me Go is neither a mystery tale nor a piece of science fiction, but a novel...

...Its tone is muted and subtle throughout, playing against the situation's intrinsic drama...

...Tommy, who is loved by both girls, is a reasonable, empirical boy...

...The possibility of their recurrence is one thread that binds the days...

...His new novel, Never Let Me Go (Knopf, 287 pp., $25.00), deserves to become a classic, and if handled well it has the potential of being a great perennial seller in schools on the level ofLord of the Flies...

...a visit to his mother, a sad, lost sufferer from senile dementia...

...It is, in many respects, a pleasant life...

...a family gathering dramatically interrupted...

...It's not what people really do out there, in normal life, if that's what you were thinking," she reprimands them...

...Looking around London this spring day in 2003, Henry is aware of his good fortune to have lived at such a propitious and prosperous time in history...

...The foil for the gentle, modest Kathy is her best friend Ruth, the kind of brashly confident girl who in normal circumstances would dominate friends and family...

...The Remains of the Day showed that Ishiguro could be masterly in his use of understatement...

...His appreciation of his world is intensified by its fragility and evanescence, confirmed by the events of the last 18 months...

...The Unconsoled (1985) was weird and marvelous, but it might have been written by Franz Kafka...

...All this happiness on display is suspect...

...First they will become "carers...

...It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety...