Stasiland

Although it traces Germany’s often turbulent and violent times between WWI and modern times, Stasiland has, in essence, grown from Anna Funder’s own personal experience. She had experienced first-hand pre- and post-wall Berlin, and spends her time satisfying her curiosity about the unique history of the German people. As a form of creative non-fiction, Stasiland encompasses Funder’s experience as well as biographical and historical content. It draws on observations, interviews, dialogue and personal reflections to bind together the strings of a complex time.

The stories collected paint a portrait of a troubled time when a wall, placed overnight between East and West Berlin, symbolically represented the division in power, ideology and freedom of the nation. After the removal of that wall, Funder, through Stasiland, set out to answer a series of questions: Why did some follow orders and others resist? Was it better to remember the past or simply try to forget? What does it mean to be human in a seemingly inhumane world?

The finished result of the inquiry into these questions was met with mixed acceptance. Despite wining awards and general praise in Australia and the UK, over twenty publishers in Germany refused to publish the book. Some questioned what right an outsider had to criticise or draw inferences on their past. Eventually, the book was launched in Germany and Funder chose the Runden Ecke building, the former Stasi district headquarters in Leipzig, to unveil her stories.

Stasiland has since been published in over sixty countries and was shortlisted for many awards in the UK and Australia, including the Age Book of the Year Award 2003, the Guardian First Book Award 2003, the Index Freedom of Expression Award 2004, and the W H Heinemann Award 2004. In June 2004 it was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize, and is now being developed for the stage by The National Theatre in London.

Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go portrays a fictional world in which the practice of cloning is widespread, where children are created as ‘spare parts’ for their ‘original’. Viewed as a promising field of research, the cloning of stem cells from humans is not without its heated debates on ethical and medical grounds, and although the cloning of humans is illegal in most parts of the world, stem cell research continues. A common claim against cloning is that bringing children into the world in this manner violates the natural order and is ‘playing God’. Critics also speak in terms of the independence of the cloned child as being violated, diminished or denied.

The first study of cloning took place in 1885, when German scientist Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch began researching reproduction. In 1958, British biologist John Gurdon cloned frogs from the skin cells of adult frogs. On July 5, 1996, a female sheep gave birth to the now-famous Dolly, a Finn Dorset lamb, the first mammal to be cloned from the cells of an adult animal, at the Roslin Institute in Scotland.

Never Let me Go is typical of dystopian literature, a form of speculative fiction that began as a response to utopian literature. In utopian fiction, a perfect world can be imagined or designed, however, a dystopia is an imagined community or society that may appear to have reached a perfect balance but is actually dehumanising and frightening. Dystopian novels can challenge readers to think differently about current social and political climates, and in some instances can even inspire action. Dystopia is a huge part of contemporary young adult fiction. The Hunger Games, Divergent and Starters commonly share stories about life in the aftermath of earth-changing catastrophes with seemingly utopian communities evolving. In the past, dystopian ideals were seen in classic texts such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

The elements of the novel that resonate with society, both at the time of writing and even more so today, are the obstacles to a perfect world Ishiguro presents and increasing medical technology and government control. The disconnection of people from one other, the intrusion of commercial enterprises into the field of medicine, and the cost of providing technology and consumer products, through exploiting human clones and depriving them of their basic rights, are all explored. Unlike many dystopian novels, the characters within Never Let Me Go are subtler in their rebellion, daring only to wonder or question and not making any powerful show of resistance.

As a ‘bildungsroman’, or coming of age, novel, Never Let Me Go follows the development of narrator Kathy H through seemingly normal milestones in childhood and into young adulthood, and is set against the backdrop of impending mortality. It also explores more timeless questions like childhood bullying and the role of sex in relationships. Never Let Me Go, as with many of Kazuo Ishiguro’s works, is characterised by dramatic irony, a literary technique originally used in Greek tragedy in which the full significance of a character’s words or actions is made clear to the audience or reader but is unknown to the character.