On plot twists that make one's heart stop

One of the joys of the holiday that I am currently half way through is that it has enabled me to read some of the books that have been sitting on the to-read pile for far too long. After great deliberation - the kind where I stoke my chin thoughtfully while staring blankly at my bookcases - I decided to bring:
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Oman Ra by Victor Pelevin
Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

As of yet, I'm only three quarters of the way through Fingersmith but I couldn't resist blogging about it. BANG.

I was a Sarah Waters convert pretty much from the first page. As most readers already know, she is a stunning storyteller and her prose is thick and tactile; I cannot get enough of it. But what I wanted to blog about today is the amazing plot twist that takes place about 175 pages in. I confess, I had no idea whatsoever that it was coming. My heart stopped. Eyes rolled back. Sweat beaded on my forehead. All as though I'd downed a glass of whiskey. I put the book down and stared at a wall for five minutes trying to work out if what I thought had just happened actually had.

It had.

I cannot comprehend the skill it must have taken to build up subtly to that moment, dropping ambiguous hints that lead the reader down the wrong road, then hitting them full in the face in one short page. I can't think of another book that has so amazed me like that. The Quincunx by Charles Palliser does repeatedly, but none of the twists there quite so dramatically change the entire direction of the plot as this one does. The Man Who Was Thursday turns about heel at the end, but because it's so near the end there isn't the same time to ruminate on the change before it is over. Similarly, Never Let Me Go does, but the twist there is a gradual dawning of realisation rather than sudden mugging out of nowhere.

I am loving Fingersmith. And I suspect there may be another big twist or two to come before this wonderful journey comes to an end.

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

Read: July 2006


Kathy H is thirty-one and has been a carer for more than eleven years now. But as her time comes to an end Kathy looks back on her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School as she strives to come to grips with the fate from which the children were shielded for so long, but which has been their destiny from the beginning. As Kathy’s narrative reflection unfolds a shadow begins to rise from which neither the reader nor the characters can hope to escape.

Kazuo Ishiguro is a master of dissecting the complexity and heartache of childhood. But in this, his sixth novel, he has incorporated into his trademark tenderness a sinister and horrifying backdrop. This is Frankenstein for the modern age, and just like Mary Shelley’s epic novel, the horror is in the terrifying and unnatural potential of science rather than the being it creates. For like Frankenstein’s monster, the children growing up at Hailsham are mere victims of the science that has created them, innocent and naïve and just trying to live a worthwhile life like the rest of us.

Throughout Never Let Me Go there is the uncomfortable notion that something horrific, almost unmentionable is lurking just around the corner, some secret which, when it is revealed, will dramatically transform the events taking place. As is Ishiguro’s style, it begins to unwind slowly, dawning gradually on the reader rather than confronting them headfirst. It is to his immense credit that the events do not spill over into science fiction or fantasy. Rather, this is terrifying because it is all too believable.

One of the things which struck me most powerfully about Never Let Me Go was Kathy’s staunch optimism and gratitude for her luck in life. I absolutely love Kazuo Ishiguro, no other author is able to carry off understatement with such panache as he, and even in this, his most emotionally involving novel, the reader is often left wondering how silence and the absence of action could resonate with such cacophonous significance.

Never Let Me Go is one of the affecting books I have ever read: I wanted to hurl it onto the floor and have a temper tantrum such was the intensity of the writing. But, of course, it was too good to put down and I finished it in two days. Never Let Me Go is the novel someone was always bound to write, the spectre of science today. Thankfully it was Kazuo Ishiguro who did so. Like Frankenstein, it is a startling work of literature which every reader the world over should read, and then read again.

9 out of 10