Culture

THE DEBT TO YOUTH:

Kazuo Ishiguro Reflects on Never Let Me Go, 20 Years Later: On the Decades-Long Creative Process Behind His Most Successful Novel (Kazuo Ishiguro, May 5, 2025, LitHub)

[I]n the late 1990s, I belatedly noticed I was no longer a “young writer”—that there was a distinct and exciting new generation emerging in Britain, typically fifteen or so years younger than me. Some of these authors I read and admired from a distance. Others became friends.

For instance: Alex Garland (who’d then recently published The Beach) and I began a pattern—still continuing today—of meeting for rambling, informal lunches in North London cafés, and I soon noticed how he, without self-consciousness or posturing, often cited writers like J.G. Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin, and John Wyndham. It was Alex who drew up for me a list of the most important graphic novels I had to read, introducing me to the work of important figures like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Alex was at that time writing a screenplay that would become the classic 2002 zombie dystopia film 28 Days Later. He showed me an early draft and I listened in fascination to him discussing the pros and cons of various ways forward.

And in the autumn of 2000, during a coast-to-coast U.S. book tour, my itinerary intersected three times with that of a young English author promoting his first novel. The novel was Ghostwritten and his name was David Mitchell—both at that point unknown to me. We found ourselves sitting in late-night lounges of hotels in the American Midwest, chilling after our respective events, competing to identify tunes the cocktail pianist was playing for us.

Alongside chat about Dickens and Dostoyevsky, I noted how he mentioned Ursula K. Le Guin, Rosemary Sutcliff, the recent Matrix movie, H.P. Lovecraft, schlocky old ghost and horror stories, fantasy literature. On returning home I read Ghostwritten and realized I’d been communing with a monster talent (an assessment that became more or less universal when he published Cloud Atlas three years later).

My growing familiarity with these younger colleagues excited and liberated me. They opened windows for me I’d not thought to open before. They not only educated me into a wider, vibrant culture, they brought to my own imagination new horizons.

Interesting that PD James too produced a great dystopian novel later in life.

PULSATIONS:

The Lion, the Wizard, and the Great Physician (Nina Maksimova, 4/15/25, Christianity Today)

I was five years old when my family immigrated from Russia to the United States, fleeing life-threatening antisemitism. From the safety of our new home, I pondered a question: Why, beneath the skin-flaying sorrow of the human story, could I sense in every capillary of my being the throbbing pulse of heartbreaking joy?

This was the question that kept me up reading, and the first fictional world where I began to glimpse answers was Narnia. Here was a story that persuasively imagined the necessity of friendship and courage in the face of hatred and terror––a story in which the heartbeat of joy beat louder. It emanated from Aslan the lion, who followed me home out of the wardrobe. He started accompanying me to kindergarten and playing tag with my friends at recess. He let me fall asleep nuzzling his mane, and the tenderness of his presence felt like déjà vu, like something I could almost recognize or a good dream I could almost remember.

One might argue I was simply recognizing C. S. Lewis’s allusions to the gospel story. But that was impossible. My family had inherited the Soviet Union’s atheism. When I met Aslan, I had never heard of “Jesus of Nazareth,” never opened a Bible, never knowingly encountered Christianity.

Aslan stayed with me for the next two years until the premiere of the Fellowship of the Ring movie. My family went to see it, and the heartbeat of joy that had reverberated in Lewis’s Narnia now surged from the depths of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

It crescendoed with nearly unbearable resonance into a longing that pulled me toward Gandalf the wizard. When I watched him die, I was so upset that I begged my mom to read me the next book in the series, The Two Towers. There, Gandalf came back from the dead, transfigured with white light, and took Aslan’s place as my imaginary companion. He remained with me for the next ten years—until they turned dark, then dangerous, and I told him to go away.

I did so because, as a teenager, I encountered more and more evil, not only outside myself but also inside. I did not need to read children’s stories anymore to know that adults could shape-shift into monsters, that we were capable of any horror. Louder than that heartbeat of joy, I began to hear a hissing in my thoughts that demanded to know why I should be kind to my enemies when I could be cruel; why I should seek good when I could seek power, pleasure.

I had no answers, only the emotions Narnia and Middle Earth had inspired. So I stopped using my imagination to indulge in “childish” stories and started digging for answers in the nonfictional abysses of 20th-century Europe. I stopped talking to Gandalf and matriculated at Dartmouth College. My first professor was a Christian.

His lectures on 20th-century Europe dissected me. I imagined myself a citizen of the Third Reich and understood I could not stop its gears from grinding up blood and marrow. I could perhaps shelter my Jewish neighbors, but that would not halt the cattle trains headed to Auschwitz. If anything, I would be arrested and gassed myself, so all my logic ordered me to opt for self-preservation.

But I could still hear that joy from my childhood, pounding like the heartbeat of a dying bird.