Never let me go, with a critical eye

here is a selection of reviews by Britain's most critical minds.

I am just really shoked by Never let me go, and though I haven't finished it yet (actually I cannot decide whether I want to be over it, and want to find out what's gonna happen to Kathy ASAP, or I don't want to know the proceedings, and I want to be outraged and shocked and deeply concerned about Kathy and Tommy and Ruth.)

(those of you who don't speak Hungarian need to put up with this, as my precious thoughts on the topic were written a few hours ago in this unfathomable finnougrish language.)

So here is what those clever white-haired guys wrote, some excerpts only, as I am not a sportspoil.

"So what is Never Let Me Go really about? It's about the steady erosion of hope. It's about repressing what you know, which is that in this life people fail one another, grow old and fall to pieces. It's about knowing that while you must keep calm, keeping calm won't change a thing. Beneath Kathy's flattened and lukewarm emotional landscape lies the pure volcanic turmoil, the unexpressed yet perfectly articulated, perfectly molten rage of the orphan.

By the final, grotesque revelation of what really lies ahead for Kathy and Tommy and Ruth, readers may find themselves full of an energy they don't understand and aren't quite sure how to deploy. Never Let Me Go makes you want to have sex, take drugs, run a marathon, dance - anything to convince yourself that you're more alive, more determined, more conscious, more dangerous than any of these characters."

M John Harrison
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/feb/26/bookerprize2005.bookerprize

there's a film, now in post production, based on the novel, directed by Mark Romanek, with Keira Knightley playing Ruth. Thought she would be Kathy - she always plays these nice and decent and sophisticated girls the viewer easily identifies with. Carey Mulligan plays Kathy. She was Kitty in Pride and Prejudice (dir. Joe Wright), yet another Keira Knightley film that I really like. And she is younger than me! fk! What a wasted damn life I am having!