Over the last few weeks I've been slowly working my way through Never Let Me Go, a rather excellent book by the highly acclaimed Japanese-English author. I think I expressed this in a recent post titled "Controlled Creativity (Talk About and Oxymoron)" that might as well have been titled "I Don't Know What The Heck Is Going on And It's Probably My Fault." As a TL:DR, I expressed my frustration with the fact that I had made it a decent way into the book and still had no clue what the point of anything was. Ishiguro is a great writer, don't get me wrong, but he seems to get cold feet every time he gets close to explaining what's going on in the story. It's not even one of those stories where you can make an educated guess as to what the significance of something is and it might be something close to that estimation but much more extreme or, you know, whatever. No. I've been in the dark for chapters on end... until YESTERDAY!
Throughout the book, these references to "donations" continue to be made. We don't really know anything about them, just that lots of people give them, there's more than one donation and the main character is a carer for those who make donations. The most frustrating thing? We have no frickin' clue what is being donated. I like to guess about some things, but this concept of donations is so frequent and so vague that I just got irritated every time the author brought them up. But! But but! I just found out that they're donating organs! Woohoo! I don't think this is a huge spoiler so calm down, I'm not ruining it. So let's talk about organ harvesting.
There's this super scary thing called organ trafficking and it happens all over the place. Like, everywhere. A lot of times, people are so poor that they sell their organs on the black market. Sometimes this pays really really well, but other times donors get terribly ripped off or, even worse, end up paying with their life or at least their health. Even less fortunate people are kidnapped and have their organs forcibly removed. Ugh.
When I think of live donations, I think of people donating one of their kidneys. After all, you only need one healthy one to survive. However, I just read on www.donorrecovery.org that you can also donate a lobe of your lung, parts of your intestine, parts of your liver, and your pancreas while you're still alive. Crazy stuff man.
So while I might be incredibly frustrated by the lack of information concerning these donations, the author has effectively prompted a physical reaction (mostly phantom organ aches) that allows me to connect with the characters more. Maybe this was his plan all along, sneaky bugger.
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