withholding, on purpose

i wanted the logistics and i'm not getting them. no explanation of the programme, no numbers, no politics, no mechanism at all. first time through, that annoyed me. second time i understood that the information is rationed to match what kathy knows and what she is permitted to want to know, which is a formal choice rather than an evasion.

the withholding is the technique. she gives you the shape of a thing, then circles back nine pages later with the detail that makes it awful, and by then you've already accepted the shape as normal. it works because her voice stays so flat about all of it.

the school material goes on too long. tommy's tantrums, the collections, the argument about the pencil case. i skimmed a stretch of hailsham on the reread and lost nothing.

what stays with me isn't the ending, it's that nobody runs. people argue about that as though it were a plot hole. it isn't. the book is about people who have been carefully made unable to imagine running, & once you read it that way the flatness of the prose is doing the same job as everything else.

no sf furniture anywhere in it. 9.