The Banality of Evil, the Insignificance of Grand Narratives, Meaning in the Mundane
A review of "Never Let Me Go" with nods to "Us" and "Carol & the End of the World"
I just finished the book "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro. I found it beautifully written, moving, surprising, for a few reasons. There was a banality to the whole thing—a majority of its movements, interactions, and descriptions feeling like something profoundly unremarkable, normal even, that one might be tempted to say obfuscated the underlying cruelty and injustice of the alternate world Ishiguro has built here. A world which is essentially identical to our own from the very recent past, with only a handful of scientific and socio-systemic alterations.
Horror author Ramsey Campbell described this as "a story that's horrifying, precisely because the narrator doesn't think it is". The story produces an unsettling sensation. There is a mysterious strangeness to the characters and their setting, how they interact and the world they engage with; it falls into an uncanny valley, for reasons which are very slowly revealed throughout the course of the story.
I was fascinated by Ishiguro's account of the writing process for this book:
"Throughout the 1990s I kept writing pieces of a story about an unusual group of "students" in the English countryside. I was never quite clear who these people were. They lived in wrecked farmhouses, and though they did a few typically student-like things - argued over books, worked on the occasional essay, fell in and out of love - there was no campus or professor in sight. Some strange fate hung over these young people, but again, I didn't know precisely what it was."
"Then one morning around five years ago, I was listening to an argument on the radio about advances in biotechnology... and the last pieces of the jigsaw fell into place. I could finally see the story I'd been looking for: something simple, but very fundamental, about the sadness of the human condition."
"Never Let Me Go" is certainly about the banality of evil. About how we live our ordinary lives, day to day, willfully ignorant of the cost its institutions and systems impose on an often invisible underclass. In that regard it reminded me of the horror film "Us" by Jordan Peele, which also introduces into our familiar world a horrifying socio-systemic mechanism, intended to reflect back on the systems that underly our actual society.
I once described “Us” this way:
"Particularly poignant for me was this idea of a nefarious system constructed well before our time, now long abandoned and yet still not fully dismantled, churning away somewhere out of sight of those of us unbothered by it. Somewhere just beneath the societal surface very well may be a system of exploitation that enables our current privilege. In case that's too subtle, I am speaking in part about systemic racism in the US; but also how often we consider the invisible underclasses who make our shoes, who harvest our agriculture, who populate our prisons, who live on wages that couldn't possibly support a family. Our systems always include trade-offs, and as designers and leaders it is our obligation to ensure the costs imposed on individuals are ethically sound and minimized to the extent possible."
Shifting to more ethical systems will at times mean choosing to absorb the costs being unfairly imposed on others, or deciding that the costs were never really worth the benefits after all, and eliminating those exploitative costs through the ethical choice to give up privileges.
Here's how Jordan Peele described his film:
"One of the central themes in 'Us' is that we can do a good job collectively of ignoring the ramifications of privilege. I think it's the idea that what we feel like we deserve comes, you know, at the expense of someone else's freedom or joy. You know, the biggest disservice we can do as a faction with a collective privilege like the United States is to presume that we deserve it, and that it isn't luck that has us born where we're born. For us to have our privilege, someone suffers. That's where the Tethered connection, I think, resonates the most, is that those who suffer and those who prosper are two sides of the same coin. You can never forget that. We need to fight for the less fortunate."
In addition to "Never Let me Go" being about a social system which imposes a dreadful cost in order to attain its seeming or apparent tranquility, I also think that this book very beautifully depicts that even though we tend to think that our lives are about these grand plots, these great hardships and journeys and accomplishments... a vast majority of our lives are in fact composed of small and tiny arcs—mere interactions that fill the space between those "larger" and "more substantial" things. As the story progresses, we learn about this horrible social system that the characters occupy, and this sense of dread and fear about their ultimate fates grows as we grow attached to them. But their story is not one of heroic intervention or champions dismantling these systems through great struggle, as Peele's "Us" turned out to be. It is mostly about how they relate to one another, how they care for and hurt one another, and how those relationships evolve.
The characters, who we will come to feel have every reason and right to rage about their condition, hardly do so, and when they do rage, it is oddly muted, as one would in the face of something unfortunate but accepted, a foregone conclusion. The only exception to this is one character, Tommy. But Tommy's raging is revealed at the opening of the book to be just as severe in the face of interpersonal cruelty from schoolmates and frustration with daily struggles.
What I'm reflecting on here is that our lives are mostly comprised of the relationships with the people in front of and around us, rather than our interactions with larger social systems. Conversations, friendships, loves, and interpersonal friction are, by and large, the stuff of life, and they are ultimately what determine whether a life is lived well or not so. Dramatic, enormous upheavals, great wrongdoings, and heroic acts certainly occur, often revealed (or narratively composed) in retrospect, but they don't take up anywhere close to as much of our living as banal conversations with coworkers, as pursuits that will produce nothing of lasting significance, as daily interactions with family members, strangers, and friends. Life is actually what happens between those magnificent peaks and valleys which we like to think of as the narrative arc of our life, and its modulations are relatively mild. We also attend to these smaller arcs and their quality vastly less, and I think that that's worth reflecting on and responding to.
To frame this in the context of a personal narrative arc, I can use the example of my daughter, who lived a full life with us going through significant difficulty and struggle for 14 years and then died. Her death as an event, though dramatic, traumatic, and definitely painful for us and her, doesn’t really register as qualifying as life-defining, not against those things which actually define what her life was. What qualifies in my mind as aspects which define her life were everyday things—good and bad. The things we went through together, our efforts to make her time spent well, with joy and with meaning. The great injustice of her condition and her ever-impending death certainly constrained and affected the quality of her life, but it didn’t define it. We did. Together we defined it—through how we cared for her. And she did, in how we spent those great swaths of ordinary time between her birth and death.
This reminds me of a thing I thought I had learned from experts in positive psychology, about our tendency to focus on and pursue "peak experiences" rather than attending to our baseline wellbeing, which is affected only in part by those occasional highs. I'm struggling to find any resources on this topic, so it's possible I'm entirely misremembering the lesson here, but I thought my takeaway of this concept was fantastically illustrated in the bizarre and hilarious animated Netflix show "Carol & the End of the World".
Carol is a seemingly depressed and (perhaps) neurodivergent woman who seems to want life to carry on, in utter mediocrity, despite the approaching end of the world due to an impending collision with another planet. While most everyone else on earth responds to their impending deaths by quitting jobs, giving over to hedonism, and frantically pursuing as many peak experiences as they can cram into their remaining months (be that extreme sports like skydiving, going on pleasure cruises, doing crime, or attempting an "Eat, Pray, Love"), Carol does none of that. She finds her community in people who distract themselves from the chaos outside by doing a boring, pointless office job together, seemingly comforted by the serenity, slowness, and familiarity of the setting. Director Dan Guterman described the show as "a love letter to routine. A show about the comforts of monotony. An animated existential comedy about the daily rituals that make up the gaps that make up a life.”
Carol resonated strongly for me. I have in many cases been the person who would rather sit quietly at home than do something “fun” or “exciting”, so I found her extremely relatable. I’d often rather fiddle with a personal project or play video games with friends online or watch a movie with loved ones than pursue anything too “peak”. I do love to be out in nature noticing, unexcited, not too stimulated…
So in Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”, in addition to that message about the banality of evil, I also found myself reflecting on this—what life is made up of—how meaning is made not mostly in our relationship to these larger systems, which certainly affect and constrain and oppress us in differing degrees; but how meaning is made in mostly how we relate to one another, in how we spend the moments between—those tiny arcs filling greater space than the greater arcs which occupy most of our attention.
The ultimate message that I got from Ishiguro’s beautiful book was that the most powerful thing we can do in most cases, the thing which enables us to help define our own and others’ lives as well-spent, is to simply care for one another in those moments, even (perhaps especially) when it has no effect on the great, terrible, churning-away machines just under the surface, churning just beneath our feet, or hurtling towards us like a world-destroying comet.