Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go, published earlier this year, is Japanese-born English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s sixth novel, arriving two years after the Booker-shortlisted When We Were Orphans. Never Let Me Go itself was one of the six novels shortlisted for the (now Man) Booker Prize, which this year went to John Banville’s turgid mess The Sea (more about that in due course). But no matter - Ishiguro is, of course, the author of The Remains of the Day, arguably the greatest novel to take the Booker Prize and one of the most perfect pieces of literature anyone could hope to write. So how does his most recent novel stack up to that earlier success? Some spoilers ahead.

Never Let Me Go is narrated by Kathy, a “carer” who has decided, as her term nears its end “sometime” in late 1990s England, to put to paper the story of herself and friends Tommy and Ruth: former students at Hailsham, a seemingly exclusive boarding school in the English countryside. Yet Hailsham is no ordinary school, and its students are no ordinary children. As the students devote their creative energies to painting and poetry, they are gradually informed (“told and not told”) that they will someday be called up to donate their vital organs. Kathy and her schoolmates have in fact been engineered for this exact purpose. The chronicle is divided to cover the three major stages of Kathy’s life: childhood at Hailsham, time spent at the Cottages (a kind of half-way house in which the clones live before they become donors or carers of donors) and carer Kathy’s reunion with Ruth and Tom.

Much of the novel is excellent, especially the section focused on life at Hailsham: Kathy’s narrative here fluctuates from happy reminiscence to uneasy questioning. From the beginning the reader is sure of something unusual afoot in this seemingly pleasant and orderly environment as the heroine and her friends slowly become conscious of their “special” condition. As the novel progresses and the characters grow, they start truly experiencing and appreciating the joys of life – friendship, love and sex. Indeed, Kathy focuses mostly on the mundane aspects of childhood and young adulthood: quarrels between friends, schoolyard rumours, interactions with teachers (or “guardians” as they are known at Hailsham) and adolescent crushes. There is a poignancy at moments when we realise the “donors” are not all that different from us – moments which bring to mind the film Blade Runner, also about genetically-engineered humans, though Never Let Me Go does not engage as explicitly with issues of science or morality. This is largely because of Kathy’s narration.
The prose of the novel seems stripped bare of artifice, which is fitting given that Ishiguro’s tale is not narrated by an articulate author such as himself. As in The Remains of the Day, he succeeds in creating a narrator who, though intelligent, is spiritually detached from the world surrounding her and programmed to behave in a certain way. Kathy, like Stevens the butler, is not fully able to grasp the full importance of her situation, yet we as readers can – and this is what makes the book all the more disturbing. Kathy is also no science-whiz, so there is no discourse on the actual cloning process – nor does there necessarily have to be, because Never Let Me Go is less a work of science fiction than a highly subjective narrative of life in an unusual space and time.

Less forgivable, perhaps, is the author’s sketchiness on the world his characters inhabit. It is only at the end of the novel, when a character delivers a lengthy monologue on the state of Britain since the end of the Second World War, that the reader discovers anything about society’s practice of cloning and the breeding of donors in special institutions. Such information does put into perspective what had occurred previously in Kathy’s narrative, yet it feels rather tacked-on, as if it is as much for the reader’s benefit as for Kathy and Tommy who listen to it.
In addition, we get to know very little about the world outside Hailsham or Kathy’s circle. This is semi-justified given that Kathy would only describe what she knows, yet by the commencement of her memoir, she should surely have had at least some experiences with “normal” people, who, apart from the “guardians” at Hailsham and several very minor characters, are almost completely absent.
Several reviewers have commented on the characters’ passive acceptance of their fate and their failure to rebel or escape even given their desire to postpone their “completions”. Yet again, this is understandable given the way Kathy and friends have been brought up: they really know nothing else, and hence accept submissively their role in society. Other critics have complained that that there are no references to resistance to the cloning programme itself, something that would be inevitable in the post-World War II world, where memories of Nazi eugenics should still be fresh in many peoples’ minds. So, in the end, one gets the sense that Ishiguro may have bitten off more than he could chew in terms of his subject matter. Then again, Never Let Me Go’s focus is on individual memory, and the lives of peripheral members of a society rather than an exploration of the society at large.

Never Let Me Go is an interesting, enjoyable yet slightly flawed work. This being Ishiguro, one can expect a work of quality literature, and it is well worth reading. [4/5]