Annals of the Book-club: Organ donors and Internet shaming

Recently we held another meeting of the Book-club at the Club.  It was our fourth meeting; there had been another one a month ago, but I didn't feel up to writing a post about it.  Wracked by guilt, I am doing both books in one post, so you can't say I neglect you completely!

Never let me go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Being blunt about it, this is one of the most boring books I have ever read, almost as bad as 'Mr Bottesby does something', which latter book is so boring that it seems to have bored itself out of existence (I gave my copy away about ten years ago, in case you want to borrow it to fight your insomnia).

Ishiguro seems to have a pathological need to be so subtle as to be soporific.  I initially had high hopes for this book, since I am very interested in organ transplants (totally against them) and was up for an intelligent, unusual take on the subject matter.  Now I can take boring books; I even read Jane Austin's Emma, a long time ago, before there was an internet and one relied more on making one's own entertainment.  What I can't forgive so easily is taking a really good idea and then boring it into extinction.

The characters are wholly unsympathetic - by the time I was half-way through the story I no longer cared even vaguely about what would happened to them.  They are like card board cut-outs of real people, bloodless, non-human, unbelievable as people.

The story is badly told.  Ishiguro indulges himself by hinting, suggesting, and carelessly dropping clues which may or may not turn out to be relevant.  He plays hide and seek with the reader, which would be just about bearable if it lead up to a towering finale.  But it actually leads to a pathetic little whimper of an ending, where the characters accept their fate demurely without any creditable attempt to avoid it.  Even the love story, supposedly so important, fizzles out even before the male partner makes his last donation (ie gets killed off for his vital organs).

The basic premises of the story are preposterous.  If humanity really decided to breed clones so we could use their organs for transplants, we would not give them 25 years of a good life first.  We would not educate them, encourage them to produce art work, write essays, live on a farm, etc etc.  We would genetically engineer them to have tiny brains so they couldn't rebel and wouldn't realise what we were doing to them, and we would kill them as soon as they were adult - latest by age 18.  Also, we would not take one organ, then take care of them in hospital, then a few months or years later take the second organ, and so on until they died because they lost too many organs.  We would take all the organs at once and get it over with.

Another criticism is that the story is badly structured.  Having wasted the first nine tenth of the book meandering aimlessly through the irrelevant memories of insignificant characters, Ihiguro suddenly realises that the book needs to be finished, and introduces one big hat from which he pulls all the rabbits he needs to finish off the story.

Having said all that, the book club did have an excellent discussion about the book, and also about organ transplants.  I was in a solid majority of one - everyone else disagreed with me, but I knew I was right!

So you've been publicly shamed, by Jon Ronson

This was a very different book!  Written by a journalist in  a lively, informative way, there was lots of interesting information about the evil underbelly of the internet, most of which I had little idea existed.

The way public internet shaming works is that someone makes a relatively innocent comment on Facebook or Twitter, and someone else considers the comment to be massively offensive and shares it amongst the more idle sections of the internet community, who have nothing better to do than to pass derogatory comments on others, and create what I believe is called a 'Shit-Storm'.

An unedifying spectacle ensues, where people with more bile than brain attack the hapless original comments-poster from a swiftly assumed morally superior position, which gets just as swiftly undermined by the out of all proportional viciousness of the critics' comments.  I mean, seriously, threatening to rape someone for having posted a picture considered offensive to veterans?  How these people can claim an attitude of moral superiority after attacking anyone in such a way is beyond me.

And it doesn't stop at making threatening comments!  People's home and work addresses and private telephone numbers are published, and some unfortunate comments posters lose their jobs and livelihoods because of some relatively minor missteps.

Of course all this should not really have shocked or surprised me, given the vitriol and barbaric threats that for example female politicians - Hillary Clinton, anyone? - have to endure just for daring to presume a position in public life.

Reading the book - which I can highly recommend - made me feel glad that I never activated the comments function on my blog!

We had an excellent discussion about this book, too!

I am not really doing it justice here, that's what happens when one does a blogpost ten days after the event!  The book is not just about internet shaming, but also covers cases where someone embellished a story to make it look better in a book and got caught, cases where sexual peccadilloes were discovered and slavered over by the gutter press, and delves into the psychological reasons of both the misbehaving victims of shaming and the self-righteous shamers themselves.

Suffice it to say that this is an informative, entertaining, well written, and very thought provoking book, which I will continue to recommend to others.