Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kazuo IshiguroEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-03-14
ISBN: 1400078776
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Never Let Me Go
Book Review: Reads easily even as it leaves the reader deeply disturbed.
Summary: 5 Stars
The narrator of Never Let Me Go Kathy H, is a thirty one year old carer in an alternative 1990s Britain. The plotline of the novel follows the fairly simple story of her recollection of a love triangle which began while she was a teenager at the exclusive but now defunct Hailsham House where she was schooled and, it would appear, raised. The story seems mundane enough at first. Girl loves longstanding male bestfriend, but subsumes her love when it becomes clear that her female best friend is also interested in the same boy. Kathy's narrative is clean and matter of fact, full of the detail of day to day school day memories. The story of love lost and regained which drives the narrative forward is one which has been played out in love songs (like the fictional "Never Let Me Go" song which Kathy takes to) for as long as love songs have been written. But this is no ordinary coming of age story. Nor is it really about a love story, although the whole concept of love, and artistic power is one which sets off the sinister underlying elements of the story. It takes about 70 pages or so of hints before the reader is made aware that neither Kathy, nor her love interest Tommy or best friend Ruth are `like us' -- usual characters in the sense that the realistic matter-of-fact guise of this novel might indicate. What the reader finally becomes aware of, more or less concurrent with the narrator, is that the characters are clones, `created' rather than born, solely for the sake of providing replacement parts for `humans,' a `species' to which these people clearly do not belong.
And yet, of course they are exactly like us. They hunger, desire, are moved by beauty and feel pain in exactly the same way. And of course however they may have come into being, they have all the same neuro-linguistic perceptions as anyone might. Somehow, and somewhere, one imagines a kind of parental set - the persons, scientists or whatever who have created them, and who has the responsibility for their existence. These missing characters form part of the novel's setting - the backstory and backdrop which is never revealed. The gods which created Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are missing from the novel, along with any kind of reference for morality. Not quite missing however are those people after whom the clones are created--the "possibles" -- and there is a kind of touching nostalgia of the sort that an adopted person might feel for his real but utterly inaccessible parents among the characters for their possible. In his usual delicate and understated way, Ishiguro creates an extraordinary tension between the many dichotomies in the setting of this story that begins to take priority over the love story as the novel moves forward. The first point of climax occurs when Kathy sees the head carer of Hailsham, "Madame," crying in her doorway after witnessing her dancing with her pillow to an old tune, the "Never Let Me Go" of the title.
For the reader, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy are simply characters, and it is Ishiguro's skill as a writer that the dichotomy between their obvious humanness and the non-human nature of their roles begins to sit uncomfortably at the back of the reader's head. The three characters' growing self-awareness and sense of being different coupled with the learned inevitably of that difference becomes poignant when Ruth goes in search of her `possible.' It is the closest any of them can get to their origins and so it is a powerful moment of loss and longing when the group of students suddenly sense the impossibility of ever striving to live the kind of lives they are longing for.
The philosophical questions around the ethics of this world, or the terrible use of what are clearly people in this way is hardly raised, with the very brief exception of a last ditch visit made by Kathy and Tommy, in an attempt to get `out of' the donor program - based on a rumour circulated among the donors that anyone who demonstrated `true love' might get let off. The lovers made their pilgrimage, and instead found some semblance of the horrible truth about their existence.
But however present the moral question is in this story, it is never directly raised, and Ishiguro resists the urge to make it obvious. If these people are artistic and capable of love, is their tragedy any greater? If they don't mind their role, is it any less horrible? It's impossible for the reader to take anything other than the position of horrified spectator in this strange world, and the more you think about it, the broader the implications of the questions raised. Because in many ways, this isn't really a distopia about the horrors of organ donation, although there is a certain degree of discomfort at the notion of raising a species, or even animals, for such a utilitarian purposes. But of course the whole issue of technological progress and morality is one which is upon us now, when even faces can be transplanted, and when machines capable of thinking are just around the corner. The morality in this novel is pretty clear, but there are also hints that the book may be showing us more the similarities rather than the differences in the lives of these characters and those of the readers. After all, we are all going to die after a relatively short life of utilitarian work on behalf of someone else, and while we may have the consolations of family which the characters in Never Let Me Go don't, the novel makes our own exertions on the hamster wheel seem almost as futile as Kathy's. It's a chilling notion that makes you want to go berserk just like Tommy.
This is a powerful, expertly written novel which reads easily even as it leaves the reader deeply disturbed. The unanswered questions it raises about what it means to be a human, about the nature of life, and about morality that will resonate with the reader beyond the pages of the book.
Magdalena Ball is the author of Sleep Before Evening
"There is so much beautiful writing here, soaring passages."
Summary of Never Let Me Go
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day comes a devastating new novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss. As children Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special?and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is another classic by the author of The Remains of the Day.
All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own.
Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day, only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure. --Regina Marler
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