The Uncertain Hour

The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Being Dead by Jim Crace are two of my all time favorite books. When I saw that both Cunningham and Crace endorsed a new book, I bought it immediately.

The Uncertain Hour by Jesse Browner is a masterpiece and it is impossible to put down. Based on the basic description (a “vivid portrait of life in Rome” and “a gripping entrée into the mind of a great man during his final hours”), I thought there might be parts of it that would be like Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (not in terms of the narrative, but in the sense that the main character in both books are confronting their own death).

It is not. In general, I liked Never Let Me Go (I wrote about it here), but the narrator in The Uncertain Hour is far more philosophical and his anguish more palpable and so the book forces the reader more fully into the story.

I generally require narrative first and writing second (I learned that from Only Revolutions which I wrote about here), but in this book the reader gets both. Plus, it is filled with numerous excellent quotes so these are just a few of my favorites.

On living and death:

We owe so little time to life, and all eternity to death, so let’s pay off our small debts first, Petronius. (32)

On reputation:

A man’s reputation is a delicate vase, vulnerable in equal measure to the malice of enemies, the prurience of strangers, and the clumsiness of friends. (44)

On civilization:

“When it comes down to it, he thought, isn’t all civilization just an exercise in measuring time, in pacing off the foundations on which to build a model of the universe of oneself?” (138)

On love and empire:

“I believe in love just as I believe in empire. They’re both transactions between partners of unequal strength, dressed up in heroic rhetoric.” (170)

It is not often that I read a book and have no complaints, but, in this case, I am unable to think of even one.

The Last Sentence

I have often thought that the best first sentence in a novel is in The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. (3)

Prior to reading Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, I thought the best last sentence was in the published version of A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (though, from what I understand, there are lots of unpublished endings, but I will have to look that up later).

After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. (332).

Now I think that sentence is tied for my favorite with the last one from Never Let Me Go (though, arguably, it is exactly the same in feeling and intent, if not the explicit words or preceding story).

I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be. (288)

A Separate Peace On Elm Street

As compelling as it is, this book totally freaked me out. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a “coming of age story” about the “coming of age” of people (clones) who are being raised so that the vital organs can be harvested.

It is complete with teenage angst, romance and girl infighting (not too different from the movie Mean Girls based on Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosiland Wiseman). However, the backdrop is the life of these clones who “know, but don’t know” that their whole existence is to provide organs to “normals”.

It is probably obvious that a book with this premise would tackle (or at least provoke contemplation about) ideas related to organ donations, cloning, research and even food production (a la the movie Fast Food Nation). It is filled with an endless stream of ethical and moral questions asked in an interesting way. But, that isn’t what got me.

What got me was the metaphor for life. We are born, we become “carers” (part of the story line) and we die (all the while we have a bit of nostalgia for our childhood home and history).

Never Let Me Go brings you along at a fast clip for the most part, but it does get bogged down in a kind of literary self-gratification (the kind that people say “what an excellent way of exposing character”), which gets a little boring:

When I found myself alone, I’d stop and look for a view – out a window, say, or through a doorway into a room – any view so long as there were no people in it. I did this so that I could, for a few seconds at least, create the illusion the place wasn’t crawling with students, but that instead Hailsham was this quiet, tranquil house where I lived with just five or six others. (90)

It is a deep and disturbing plot line, but it has moments of humor:

You could go around implying you’d read all kinds of things, nodding knowingly when someone mentioned, say, War and Peace, and the understanding was that no one would scrutinize your claim too rationally. You have to remember, since we’d been in each other’s company constantly since arriving at the Cottages, it wasn’t possible for any of us to have read War and Peace without the rest noticing. But just like with the sex at Hailsham, there was an unspoken agreement to allow for a mysterious dimension where we went off and did all this reading. (122)

Last, even though the clones know the end of life will come (don’t we all?), the narrator still approaches it in a manner that is void of the context (which, I guess, if it is the only existence you have know, you would do):

And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I’d always assumed I’d plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever. (213)

All in all, Never Let Me Go is super chilling, but well worth reading.