I didn't mean to go this long without another blog post! I really need to do it more often, I forget how much I enjoy writing it! Ok so this 'review' is of chapters seven to nine - I have read further than that, but the book is split into parts, so chapter ten was a good place to stop this post, as the next chapter is in part 2.
You know I said last time how we didn't really know exactly what these people were? Well the beginning of Chapter Seven explains all. The explanation comes in the form of Miss Lucy: a guardian who seems passionate about treating these children properly, especially when 'normal' people seem to feel a great aversion to them. We find out through her something really awful: these children were made especially to be donors for other people when they're older. This means that whenever 'normal' people like us need an operation/transplant or something, a perfect match can be found in one of these people. Their aim in life is to die. Not only did this get me thinking about Harry Potter again (I'll get bakc to that in a bit), but it reminded me of My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. That book (which I loved) was about a girl who was born to be the perfect match for her sister, so that she could help give the blood/kidney etc to keep the other alive. This doesn't seem exactly ethical and I'm undecided about how I feel towards it, however doing it on this scale, 'creating' masses of children just so they can die seems really horrible.
Bringing Harry Potter into it, there's been this huge debate since the last book came out, and we discovered what Harry had to do in order to truly defeat Voldemort, about whether Dumbledore raised Harry as 'a pig for slaughter': whether he knew all along that he was going to die (if you want more depthful discussions I'd suggest listening to MuggleCast, an awesome podcast). To do that to one person is bad enough but to that many? Miss Lucy tells them that they will never grow up properly, won't be able to get jobs, travel, have families or anything because their only point is to give their bodies to others. Just that thought is pretty grim: to know that your life is only going to be about 30 years long and that you can't do what you want with it must be awful.
Despite this terrible truth hanging over them, the students of Hailsham don't seem to think about it much. These chapters detail the characters between the ages of 15 and 17, and I find it strange how Kathy, our narrator and personal connection with this strange world, reveals less and less about herself. It's not like she's being secretive, more that the focus of her story is on other people: namely Ruth and Tommy. She of course tells us things about her, but not many of her feelings. For example, Ruth and Tommy get together as a couple (which, by the way, I was surprised at, I thought it would be Kathy and Tommy) and Kathy tells us all about their relationship, but very little about her actual feelings towards it. Also, she suggests that she has a thing with one of the other boys in her year, but we don't here mentin of it except for a couple of lines. This is a bit like The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford, in which we don't find out the narrator's name until very far on in the book, despite the fact that it's written from her perspective, and when he gets married it's literally a couple of lines: the whole story is focused on her cousin Linda instead of her.
Anyway, life goes on, and Kathy retains this personal relationship with us - I wonder if this is deliberate: her job is to be a carer, in which she talks a lot to her patients to comfort them, and maybe she is so in the habit of it that she does it for us too. Ruth and Tommy split up, and she mentions how people expected her to be the "natural successor" but never tells us her feelings about it. Again that's another example of her not focusing on herself.
I don't understand how Kathy puts up with Ruth - she's so controlling, stubborn and manipulative I wouldn't be able to stand her! She seems to take their friendship for granted - I might be proved wrong later but that's what it seems like to me. Something strange also happens: Miss Lucy tells Tommy that the art they do at Hailsham (there's a hige focus on art) is incerdibly important, much more so than they could imagine. I'm not sure of the significance of this yet, but I'm sure we'll find out more about it...
No comments:
Post a Comment