I caught a glimpse of his face in the moonlight, caked in mud and distorted with fury, then I reached for his flailing arms and held on tight. He tried to shake me off, but I kept holding on, until he stopped shouting and I felt the fight go out of him. Then I realised he too had his arms around me. And so we stood together like that, at the top of that field, for what seemed like ages, not saying anything, just holding each other, while the wind kept blowing and blowing at us, tugging our clothes, and for a moment, it seemed like we were holding onto each other because that was the only way to stop us being swept away into the night.

Considering staggering ethical dilemmas the reader is presented in this novel, our narrator Kathy seems fairly numb to it all. The above passage, at the very tail end of the novel, is the only time I really felt anything from her.

On one hand, this was a successful narrative choice, as Kathy's status as a "student" means that emotional mildness has literally been molded into her. But on the other, the impact of what has been done for medical science and how it was achieved seems to pack less of a punch at the reveal.