never let me go book review

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'Never Let Me Go': When They Were Orphans

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By Sarah Kerr

April 17, 2005

NEVER LET ME GO By Kazuo Ishiguro. 288 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.

There is no way around revealing the premise of Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel. It is brutal, especially for a writer celebrated as a poet of the unspoken. But it takes a while for us to get a handle on it. Since it's the nature of Ishiguro narrators to postpone a full reckoning of their place in the world, all we know in the early going is that we don't quite know what's going on.

We have inklings. The novel's 31-year-old narrator, Kathy H., announces on the first page that she has worked for more than 11 years as a "carer." The people she assists in her line of work are "donors" at a recovery center, in pain and doped up on drugs. Logic suggests that bodily organs are involved. But gently decent Kathy is our host on this journey, and instead of surveying her life in the present (that would be "England, late 1990's," according to an introductory note) she likes to let her mind wander back to the years she spent with her two closest friends, Ruth and Tommy, at boarding school -a fabled, bucolic place in the countryside with the Dickens-parody name of Hailsham.

Kathy and her classmates were taught to think of themselves as supremely lucky for having gone to Hailsham. It was the best, the most privileged of schools. Still, we can hear off notes. The place was run by "guardians," who come across like nuns devoted to a faith other than religion. Both maternally protective and weirdly distant, these women prevented students from leaving the campus, and had them screened each week by a doctor. And they kept the kids busy with art projects that seemed freighted with meaning, as if a child's creative output might hold a clue to her fate. "Thinking back now," Kathy says, "I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves -- about who we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside -- but hadn't yet understood what any of it meant." Slowly, we're led to see that she and her classmates are clones, reared in isolation at a special school, pampered and sheltered and encouraged to feel like children for as long as possible but trained for a mean postgraduate destiny.

The setup is so shocking -- in such a potentially dime-store-novel way -- that it's hard to believe at first that it issued from Ishiguro's desktop. Has one of our subtlest observers gone to pulp? The novel is the starkest instance yet of a paradox that has run through all Ishiguro's work. Here is a writer who takes enormous gambles, then uses his superior gifts to manage the risk as tightly as possible. The question is what he's gambling on. Is he setting up house in a pop genre -- the sci-fi thriller -- in order to quietly upend its banal conventions, as he did with the manor-house elegy in "The Remains of the Day" and the detective yarn in "When We Were Orphans"? Is he issuing a warning about the ethics of reproductive science?

I suspect Ishiguro's intention is both more personal and more literary. The theme of cloning lets him push to the limit ideas he's nurtured in earlier fiction about memory and the human self; the school's hothouse seclusion makes it an ideal lab for his fascination with cliques, loyalty and friendship. The voice he's written for Kathy H. is a feat of imaginative sympathy and technique. He works out intricate ways of showing her naïveté, her liabilities as an interpreter of what she sees, but also her deductive smarts, her sensitivity to pain and her need for affection. She has a capacity to grow and love that is heroic under the circumstances. Often quite wittily, Ishiguro shows how the Hailsham kids, cut off from outside contact, manage to fill in the blanks of their world with taboos, jokes, fantasies, fads and paranoid rumors of the unknown. The eeriest feature of this alien world is how familiar it feels. It's like a stripped-down, haiku vision of children everywhere, fending off the chaos of existence by inventing their own rules.

So the dare Ishiguro has taken on might be this: to capture what is unmistakably human, what survives and insists on subtly expressing itself after you subtract the big stuff -- the specific baggage, the parents, orientation toward a culture, a past and possible futures -- that shapes people into individuals. As Kathy and Ruth and Tommy enter a haunted, attenuated adulthood, their friendship becomes a shifting love triangle. We root for Kathy -- which is not quite the same thing as identifying with her. For, authentic as her emotions may be, by definition she's personality-challenged. At times uncomfortably, for a work that aims to give us a distilled and persevering human essence, we can sense the controlling care with which Ishiguro invents and organizes her memories. Yet if the novel feels a bit too distant to move us to outright heartbreak, it delivers images of odd beauty and a mounting existential distress that hangs around long after we read it.

When Ishiguro first rose to literary superstardom, the key to understanding his uncanny, poetically concentrated voice seemed to be his international heritage (he was born in postwar Nagasaki, and raised in England from the age of 6); it helped explain his protagonists' unstable sense of perspective. The new novel puts one in mind of a less remarked fact from his youth. Before becoming a full-time writer in the early 1980's, he spent three years as a social worker, assisting homeless people. In interviews he has described both his idealism during that era and the disillusionment he ultimately felt.

Why is this relevant? Kathy may be the most honest of Ishiguro's protagonists to date, but there are secret-keepers in this novel, and their story and their motives pique our interest too. Late in the book, Kathy and Tommy seek out a couple of their old Hailsham matrons to ask a few questions about who (or what) they were. It's a mischievous scene, charged with both horror-flick suspense and a more complex menace that calls to mind late Henry James. Comfortingly, the moment underlines our understanding that this is a crazy alternate universe: we readers are not raising duplicate human beings for harvest, after all.

Then again, like every society, ours has euphemisms for how we deal with the less fortunate. "I can see," one of the guardians, named Miss Emily, tells them, "that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that." What she goes on to say is impossible to describe here without giving away too much. Let's just say that Ishiguro has a way of pitting innocence against experience, while reminding us that we're capable of both.

Sarah Kerr has written about books and culture for The New York Review of Books, Vogue and Slate, among other publications.

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NEVER LET ME GO

by Kazuo Ishiguro ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2005

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.

An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans , 2000).

Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.

Pub Date: April 11, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SUMMER WE CROSSED EUROPE IN THE RAIN

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by Kazuo Ishiguro ; illustrated by Bianca Bagnarelli

by Kazuo Ishiguro

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

More by Mark Z. Danielewski

by Mark Z. Danielewski

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

Mantel, Woodson on Women’s Prize Longlist

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Never let me go, common sense media reviewers.

Gripping sci-fi paints teens' bleak, unforgettable world.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

It's important to separate fantasy from realit

Many of the characters have real affection for one

Kathy, the central character in Never Let Me Go, s

Tommy is emotionally on edge and throws temper tan

Characters talk a lot about having sex, and it is

The sci-fi world of Never Let Me Go, particularly

Educational Value

It's important to separate fantasy from reality here. Though Ishiguro blends some real English geography into the science fiction world he creates, almost all of the places in Never Let Me Go are pure inventions.

Positive Messages

Many of the characters have real affection for one another and develop close relationships in spite of their bleak prospects. The novel also places a high value on artistic creativity as a sign of humanity.

Positive Role Models

Kathy, the central character in Never Let Me Go , shows real compassion and understanding toward her friends. Despite the fact that her closest girlfriend, Ruth, often lies and manipulates people, Kathy always tries to see Ruth's point of view, and she is kind to the volatile Tommy even when he is ostracized by most other students. Some of the adult teachers, called "guardians," are also kind and concerned. Miss Lucy wants to reveal more information to her students because she believes this is most fair to them. Miss Emily and Madame care a great deal about the students' quality of life.

Violence & Scariness

Tommy is emotionally on edge and throws temper tantrums during which he screams and swears at other kids who tease him.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Characters talk a lot about having sex, and it is mentioned that some couples have sex. One guardian educates her students about the mechanics of sexual intercourse, and encourages her students not to become sexually involved unless it is with someone with whom they feel emotionally connected. In one scene, a woman briefly describes masturbating her boyfriend.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

The sci-fi world of Never Let Me Go , particularly at the Hailsham boarding school, has its own strange economic system. Students trade "tokens" for items they find in "sales." Within this context, the students place a high value on certain possessions, which they collect and display.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Never Let Me Go is set in a highly disturbing sci-fi reality in which young people try to make sense of their relationships and an increasingly hopeless world. The author introduces a host of invented, unnatural roles: students, guardians, careers, and donors, and slowly reveals what these labels mean. However, most of the interpersonal situations that crop up are fairly believable, typical adolescent scenarios, and tween and teen readers may identify with the central characters. Though this book, by one of England's most acclaimed living novelists, was written for an adult audience, the teen and young adult characters make it appealing to younger readers, and the prose is simple and straightforward enough to make it accessible to readers aged 12 and up. However, some parents may feel the book's sexual content is too strange for pre-teen readers. A film version of Never Let Me Go received positive reviews when it was released in 2010 (out on video in 2011), but was rightfully called very dark and depressing.

Where to Read

Community reviews.

Parents say (1)
Kids say (3)

Based on 1 parent review

Fascinating social sci-fi

What's the story.

Now a young woman, Kathy reflects on her life as a child and as a teen at Hailsham, the exclusive English boarding school she attended. She recalls the intimate relationships she forged with Ruth, whose lies tested their friendship, and Tommy, a troubled and sensitive outcast. Over time, the three central characters uncover the truth about their guardians, their fate, and what they mean to each other.

Is It Any Good?

Readers are kept on very much the same footing as the central characters; we experience the same kind of suspense as the dark, disturbing reality they face unfolds, and it's gripping. As he famously proved in his Man Booker Award-winning novel Remains of the Day (1989), Ishiguro is a master of restraint; he holds back just enough to create emotional tension, so even his least eventful plots become page-turners. Though Never Let Me Go is not a masterpiece on the order of Remains , it is thought-provoking and creates a fully realized, horrific, unforgettable world.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about human cloning, which figures in the story. If such a thing were possible in the real world, should it be done?

Do you agree with Miss Lucy that students should have been told more about their future lives and purpose? Why or why not?

In many ways, Kathy and her friends seem like pretty typical teenagers. What do you think makes them seem "normal," or not?

Kathy and Ruth's relationship is quite troubled. Why do you think Kathy forgives Ruth so much?

Book Details

Author : Kazuo Ishiguro
Genre : Science Fiction
Topics : Friendship
Book type : Fiction
Publisher : Vintage Books
Publication date : March 14, 2006
Number of pages : 304
Last updated : June 17, 2015

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Never Let Me Go: Book Review

Never Let Me Go, written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published in 1992, is one of the greatest alternative history novels ever written. It’s the only alternative history novel ever shortlisted for the Booker Prize and it won many other literary awards.

Never Let Me Go: Title

The title is an allusion to a music album entitled Never Let Me Go by a fictional singer, Judy Bridgewater. The novel’s protagonist loves the album, and her listening to it is a motif that recurs throughout the novel. Using a defining motif in the title is a classic title archetype.

(For more on titles, see How to Choose a Title For Your Novel )

Never Let Me Go: Logline

Three friends, brought up understanding that they will donate their organs and die at a young age, try to find some meaning in their brief lives.

(For more on loglines see The Killogator Logline Formula )

Never Let Me Go: Plot Summary

Warning: My plot summaries contain spoilers. Major spoilers are blacked out like this [blackout]secret[/blackout]. To view them, just select/highlight them.

It’s the late 1990s, in England. Kathy, a carer who looks after ‘donors’ who, it seems, do not survive their donations, reminisces about her time at Hailsham, a boarding school.

Kathy’s two best friends at Hailsham are Ruth and Tommy. Kathy recounts several events from their schooldays, which seem idyllic – learning and playing like any boarding-school children. However, throughout their time at Hailsham, the children know they’re not normal and will eventually become ‘donors’.

A headmistress, known as ‘Miss Emily’, runs the school. The teachers, known as guardians, teach a normal curriculum but with an emphasis on art and keeping healthy. The students exhibit their art, and a woman known as ‘Madame’ takes away the best pieces.

One guardian becomes upset at the students’ vague understanding of their fate. She says the school has brought them up aware of ‘donations’, but without really comprehending the implications. She attempts to explain, but the children still don’t really understand. The guardian leaves the school shortly afterwards.

The Cottages

When they’re sixteen, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy go to a half-way-house called ‘The Cottages’.

Ruth and Tommy started a romantic relationship during their last year at the school and continue it at the Cottages, but Kathy never forms a long-term relationship with anyone.

Two of the older students tell Ruth that they saw a woman who could be her ‘original’ working in an office (thus confirming that the ‘donors’ are clones). They all decide to investigate. During the trip, the two older students say that they’ve heard a rumour that couples from Hailsham can have their donations deferred if they can prove they’re genuinely in a romantic relationship. Kathy, Ruth and Tommy have never heard this rumour.

Tommy and Kathy go off together and find a copy of Kathy’s favourite music tape, which she last had at Hailsham. Tommy also tells Kathy that he suspects rumours about deferments are true and that he believes that Madame uses the art collection to decide if people can have deferments.

Back at the Cottages, Ruth becomes jealous of Tommy and Kathy’s close friendship and starts antagonising Kathy. Hurt by Ruth’s behaviour, Kathy applies to become a carer and moves away from the Cottages.

Kathy becomes a carer and doesn’t see either Ruth or Tommy for many years. During the intervening period, Hailsham closes.

When she hears that Ruth’s donations have started, and that her health is deteriorating fast, Kathy becomes her carer. Some donors manage up to four donations, but Ruth is not strong enough for that, and both Ruth and Kathy suspect Ruth’s second donation will lead to her death.

Ruth wants to meet up with Tommy, who’s in a different donor centre. Kathy arranges a car trip. At first, Kathy and Tommy gang up on Ruth, remembering the thoughtless things she’s done to them both. Ruth, though, is regretful and tells Kathy and Tommy they should get together for whatever time they have left. Also, she has discovered where Madame lives. It’s too late for her, but she urges Kathy and Tommy to ask Madame for one of the rumoured deferrals…

Soon after, [blackout]Ruth makes her second donation and dies. Kathy becomes Tommy’s carer and they become romantically involved. Following Ruth’s wishes, they track Madame down and ask for a deferral.[/blackout]

They discover [blackout]that Madame lives with Miss Emily. The two women tell Kathy and Tommy that there is no such thing as a deferral – the rumour was just wishful thinking by the donors.[/blackout]

In reality, [blackout]Hailsham was part of a failed attempt to show that the donors were being abused. Madame exhibited the gallery of artwork around the country, trying to convince the public that donors were as human as everyone else.[/blackout]

Madame and Miss Emily [blackout] both say they’re sorry, but there’s nothing they can do. Kathy seems to accept this, but Tommy is horrified.[/blackout]

Tommy [blackout]asks Kathy not to be his carer for his final donation as he doesn’t want her to see him die. They part, with Kathy knowing her own donations and death are imminent.[/blackout]

(For more on summarising stories, see How to Write a Novel Synopsis )

Never Let Me Go: Analysis

Warning: inevitably my analysis contains spoilers.

The Alternate History of Never Let Me Go

Never let Me Go is not an alternative history novel in the way most of the novels I review are. There’s no specifically stated point of departure, but it would seem that in the 1950s scientists perfected human cloning and the public waved away ethical concerns. In the 1970s, the small group that ran Hailsham tried to raise the ethical issues but were unsuccessful. Apart from that, the world doesn’t seem to have changed.

This lack of consequences makes the world of Never Let Me Go more of a fantasy world than an alternate history (see What is Alternative History? )

Never let Me Go is not a fast-paced or plot-driven novel. However, Ishiguro uses hinting of problems to come and mild cliffhangers to keep the story interesting and page-turning – it’s not a slow read.

Understated

Kathy narrates the entire novel in the past tense. She’s an unreliable narrator because of her own lack of awareness of the horror of the story. When she talks about the clones’ sad lives in a matter of fact, accepting way, it provokes an emotional response in the reader.

Throughout the story, Kathy and the others seem to just accept their fate. Apart from attempting to seek a ‘deferral’, they don’t try to escape, rebel or protest. They don’t even consider suicide. Ruth is the only one who has any thoughts of doing anything other than becoming a carer and then a donor. She dreams of working in an office like a normal person, although even she realises it’s just a fantasy.

The ‘out of universe’ reason no one tries to run away is that the novel is, as explained above, a metaphor for human life. There’s no ‘running away’ from the fact that we’re all going to die one day. Ask yourself why you accept your fate and you understand why the characters do the same. Where is there to run to?

However, there’s no canonical ‘in universe’ explanation for why the donors accept their fate so passively. However, it’s hinted that they’re tracked and monitored, e.g. they use tags to sign in at the cottages. And of course there may be nowhere to run to, as the same system is likely to be in place anywhere else they could go to.

Another possibility is that society regards the donors as pariahs outside normal society. It may be impossible for donors to get a normal job or housing, legally or due to prejudice. It’s suggested in several scenes in the book that people are scared of and repulsed by the donors. That leaves them with very few options.

Ishiguro himself has said that the donors simply don’t have any concept of ‘running away’ even being a possibility. He’s also said that the entire question of ‘Why don’t they run away?’ only comes up with western audiences.

In the end, the ‘in universe’ explanations are not fully explored, as the author’s purpose is metaphorical.

Reality: Human Cloning Clones have existed throughout history as twins are genetically identical, naturally occurring clones. However, the first artificially cloned animals were born in the 1990s, raising the possibility of artificial human cloning in the future. The ethical issues around the sanctity of life and human rights quickly led to bans on reproductive human cloning worldwide. As reproductive human cloning is illegal, and the use of clones as a supply of organs for transplantation is utterly unethical and against any conception of human rights, ‘harvesting’ of clones is unlikely ever to take place. However, scientists are researching therapeutic cloning of human cells, and lab-grown organs are a possibility for future medicine.

The movie The Island, starring Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor, has the same basic premise as Never Let Me Go , but takes it in a very different, action-orientated-thriller, direction.

In Never let Me Go the protagonists are aware of their fate and, largely, accept it, while in The Island the clones are in what amounts to a prison and the prison authorities tell them that the world outside is a wasteland . Discovering the truth about what’s really happening, the protagonists attempt to escape. The Hollywood approach of The Island is in stark contrast to the contemplative nature of Never Let Me Go.

Never Let Me Go: My Verdict

Probably the best written alternative history novel ever. Hauntingly beautiful.

Never Let Me Go: The Movie

An adaptation of Never Let Me Go , staring Keira Knightley , Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield, was released in 2010. It’s a good adaptation, sticking closely to the plot of the novel. It’s worth watching, but to me it’s nowhere near as good as the book.

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The Never Let Me Go novel is available on UK Amazon here and US Amazon here .

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Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

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A tale of deceptive simplicity that slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance – and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work.

From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans , a moving new novel that subtly re-imagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love. As a child, Kathy–now thirty-one years old–lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory. And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed–even comforted–by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham's nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood–and about their lives now. A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance–and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work.

Excerpt Never Let Me Go

My name is Kathy H. I'm thirty-one years old, and I've been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That'll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isn't necessarily because they think I'm fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who've been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space. So I'm not trying to boast. But then I do know for a fact they've been pleased with my work, and by and large, I have too. My donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as "agitated," even before fourth donation. Okay, maybe I am boasting ...

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I was a little disappointed with Never Let Me Go - not because of the writing, which is as elegant as usual, but that Ishiguro raises many questions but answers few... continued

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Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954. He came to Britain at the age of six when his father began research at the National Institute of Oceanography. He was educated at a grammar school for boys in Surrey and then read English and Philosophy at the University of Kent, Canterbury, followed by a creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. In 1981 he published three short stories, then in 1982 he published A Pale View of Hills. In 1983 he was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Writers'. An Artist of the Floating World followed in 1986, it won the Whitbread Book of the Year award and was short listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The ...

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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Kazuo Ishiguro is a master storyteller, in a class of his own making. In this, his sixth and strangest novel, his narrative brilliance depends, as always, on over-simplicity, a highly provocative idiom which embraces both the prosaic and the prissy. Innumerable sleights of hand, sly flash-forwards, almost psychotic bits of underwriting and a multitude of red herrings combine to make the reader ache with curiosity about what happened earlier and what happens next.

Ostensibly - but this is surely just another massive Ishiguro tease - Never Let Me Go is about a group of genetically-engineered or test-tube children living in a comfortable country house called Hailsham. Here there is a sports pavilion and a playing field, and the students do ordinary things like playing rounders. One little girl even has a gorgeous, luscious pencil case with a furry pom-pom attached to its zip...

Quite so, but from the uneasy opening lines onwards, we know there is something special about these children. They have no parents, no surnames, they never go on holiday, they will never have babies of their own. They are, in fact, being exclusively bred to become "donors".

The exact meaning of this sinister word is not made clear until page 73, when one of their more outspoken guardians suddenly blurts it all out. "None of you will go to America," she tells her charges. "None of you will be film stars... Your lives are set out for you. You'll become adults, then... you'll start to donate your vital organs. That's what each of you was created to do."

This thoroughly macabre tale is told by a pupil called Kathy in a schoolgirlish or nurse-like vernacular, at times brooding, mawkish, wearisome or poignantly cheery. She focuses particularly on her relationship with two fellow students, Tommy and Ruth. The bonds of loyalty between them, the allegiance and camaraderie - old Ishiguro themes - provide the book with its title. The hold they exercise on each other, and on the reader, becomes tighter as the story proceeds.

The dreadfulness of the subject matter - even Kathy admits at one point, "It's horror movie stuff" - is rubbed in by the perkily banal language. The rain comes "bucketing down", people "don't have the faintest", and sections begin with preambles like, "This might all sound daft but...". From time to time, the reader is dragged in, if not fatally compromised, by asides like, "I don't know how it was where you were...".

After a while, the story moves away from Hailsham - the name has its own eerie resonance and double meanings - but into an only marginally wider world. Kathy is now a carer, still closely involved with Tommy and Ruth, and hurrying between various "recovery centres" where she helps uncomplaining donors through their suicidally heroic ordeals. Donors, incidentally, do not "die". They "complete".

The narrator's time on the roads echoes the love-sick butler's odyssey in The Remains of the Day . She often sleeps in an "overnight" and sits alone in motorway cafeterias. Ishiguro's England is a simplified and desolate place, featureless apart from the odd bus shelter - wasn't there a significant bus shelter in the butler's story? - and such comically downbeat things as the shadowy reflections you see in hospital floors or "double glazed windows which seal at the touch of a handle".

The relish with which such matters are described is central to Ishiguro's art, but their incorporation into the text is done with such enigmatic grace and lightness of touch, such naturalness, that the reader may be forgiven for sometimes wondering if they are reflections of the author's own character and taste. Ishiguro undoubtedly has an artist's double vision. Perhaps he is also genuinely interested in double-glazing? If this is so, does it make his naively innocent pose somewhat artificial? It is also tempting to ask if Ishiguro's use of red herrings is a form of genius or evidence of a wandering mind.

In this novel, he frequently builds up the tension with appetite-whetting references to offstage noises, unexplained things on people's sleeves or - as in his first novel, A Pale View of Hills - caught around people's feet. Such diversions seem to have no direct bearing on the plot but their accumulated effect is so invigorating that it hardly matters if these are meticulously calculated master strokes or, just occasionally, actual slips of the pen.

Halfway through, Kathy and her two chums even pay a typically irrelevant but highly disturbing token visit to some symbolic marshland, a chilling reminder of the wistful landscape featured in A Pale View of Hills . This is the only occasion in Never Let Me Go when the author reverts to the Japanese-ness that characterised his early work and the dreaminess in which some critics feel he over-indulged in his mightily ambitious novel, The Unconsoled .

The narrative is rendered even more exciting by the fact that none of these poor doomed "clones" fights their fate. Have they been brain-washed not to care?

A brief flutter of interest is created by a chance encounter with a woman from whom Kathy's friend Ruth might possibly have been cloned, but their origins are of only passing interest to them. "Look down the toilet," declares Tommy after this last episode. "That's where you'll find we all come from."

In an utterly riveting final scene, which takes place in Littlehampton of all places (more Ishiguro playfulness?), our heroes have a meeting with the two high-minded women who set up Hailsham. Here the author introduces a beautiful red herring in the shape of a mysterious bedside cabinet which is being heaved down some stairs and taken off in a white van.

This is all very suggestive, all very medical, but Never Let Me Go has as little to do with genetic engineering and the cloning controversy as The Remains of the Day has to do with butlering or When We Were Orphans to do with detective work.

Ishiguro is primarily a poet. Accuracy of social observation, dialogue and even characterisation is not his aim. In this deceptively sad novel, he simply uses a science-fiction framework to throw light on ordinary human life, the human soul, human sexuality, love, creativity and childhood innocence.

He does so with devastating effect, gently hinting that we are all, to some extent, clones, all copycats and mimics who acquire our mannerisms from the TV and cinema screens, even advertisements, as much as from our elders and betters. And, more frighteningly, that we are all, to some extent, pawns in someone else's game, our lives set out for us.

Andrew Barrow's 'Quentin and Philip' is published by Pan

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Simple, Sparse and Profound: David Sexton on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

“what this book is about is ordinary, normal and everyday, the knowledge that we are mortal...”.

In 1990, even before starting The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro had been working on a project called “The Students’ Novel,” about “these strange young people living in the countryside, calling themselves students where there’s no university.” There was some kind of strange fate hanging over them, he recalled, that was related to nuclear weapons.

“I thought that they were going to come across nuclear weapons that were being moved around at night in huge lorries and be doomed in some way,” resulting in a life span of thirty, rather than eighty, years, he told the Paris Review. He could not finish these stories, however. He took the project up again between The Unconsoled and his fifth novel, When We Were Orphans, published in 2000, but then again abandoned it.

Only around 2001 did the critical idea of dropping the nuclear element and turning instead to cloning come to him. “Around that time, in 2001, there was a lot of stuff about cloning, about stem-cell research, about Dolly the sheep. It was very much in the air,” Ishiguro says. One morning he heard a debate about biotechnology on the radio and seized upon the concept. “I could see a metaphor here. I was looking for a situation to talk about the whole aging process, but in such an odd way that we’d have to look at it all in a new way.” Actually, he added, the novel is hardly about the aging process and certainly not about old age but rather a way of explaining certain aspects of “what happens to you as you leave childhood, face up to adulthood, and then face up to your own mortality.”

And so Never Let Me Go came into being: the story of three friends who grow up in an enclosed environment, a kind of boarding school, only gradually coming to understand that, parentless and unable to have children themselves, they are not considered to be fully human like the people outside, destined for only very brief and restricted lives as adults, before they are required to fulfill the purpose for which they were created, donating their organs, until they die, or, as they call it, they “complete.”

Our realization of the truth about their situation is gradual. There is no startling reveal, no single shocking disclosure of where we are headed. Rather, just as the children themselves only slowly come to understand their fate, so do we as readers only piece together the implications gradually, as we do in life. In fact, the word “clone” appears for the first time only in Chapter 14, in Ruth’s tirade about the students being modeled on “trash,” long after the term will have occurred to the mind of every reader.

Ostensibly a work of science fiction, Never Let Me Go is really nothing of the kind. Ishiguro says he’s perfectly open to people reading it as a chilling warning about biotechnology but feels they’ve missed the inner heart of the book if they take it that way. He has certainly given readers nothing to foster such a misreading. For the book is set in the past, not the future: “England, late 1990s” it is specified before the novel begins.

The narrator, Kathy H, is thirty-one as the book opens, and has been a “carer” for nearly twelve years. She looks back to her time at a school she remains very proud to have attended, Hailsham, recalling first when she and her friends were children there, and then when they were teenagers, so locating it in the early and later Seventies, perhaps. Then in Part Two, she tells us about their lives afterwards, in “the Cottages” as young adults, perhaps in the early Eighties. But such dating is never precise and there are few contemporary references. There is almost no allusion to technology, beyond humdrum cars, Rovers and Volvos, and old-fashioned cassette tapes and Walkmans.

Almost nothing about the actual biological status of the clones is specified either—neither how they were created, nor how they can make their “donations” and continue for a while to live. Nor are we given any information about changes in society at large. Quite remarkably, there are simply no futuristic, alternative world or science-fiction components to the story. For what this book is about is ordinary, normal and everyday, the knowledge that we are mortal, that our time is limited, death inescapable.

And everything about the way in which it is written, from that absence of technology to the conversational, unremarkable language in which Kathy tells us her story, is calculated to bring it home to us that these are our own lives we are contemplating. In his invariably clear and modest way, Ishiguro describes this radical narrative thus: “The strategy here is that we’re looking at a very strange world, at a very strange group of people, and gradually, I wanted people to feel they’re not looking at such a strange world, that this is everybody’s story.”

As in all Ishiguro’s novels, he never explicitly states the conditions of life he is depicting but asks readers to realize what they are for themselves, to gather much not just from what is said but from what is not said as well. This internalizes the world of the novel for the reader in quite a different way from a more overt telling. His great admirer Hanya Yanagihara has spoken of his “remarkable way of using the white space —a lot of writers feel they have to say something all at once on the page, they’re maximalists and he’s not. He’s relying on the reader to understand what is happening off the page.”

lshiguro himself compares his ellipticality to that found in songs that contain many more hidden things than the average prose story. “You’re going to try to structure the unsaid things as finely and narrowly as you structure the said things. So you often leave out explicit meanings. You deliberately create spaces in the songs for the person listening to inhabit,” he told Alan Yentob in a 2021 Imagine TV profile. So it becomes your own story—rather as Kathy makes her own interpretation of the song “Never Let Me Go.”

It is telling that the very title, so poignant in itself, should be that of an imaginary song —a song asking for the impossible, like Bob Dylan’s great invocation of what we may not be, “Forever Young.” In that TV program, Ishiguro explained: “Never let me go is an impossible request. You can say, hold on to me for a long time, that’s reasonable. But never let me go—you know that what is being asked for, and asked for with great passion and need, is actually ultimately impossible to fulfill, so it’s that never that really appealed to me. It’s that huge human need just for a moment to deny the reality that we will all be parted.”

Many readers have testified to the fact that Never Let Me Go has a singular way of not just affecting them greatly in their conscious awareness but of becoming part of their unconscious and their own dream-life. One such, as it happens, was the actor Andrew Garfield, who played Tommy in the 2010 film of Never Let Me Go.

Interviewed, aged twenty-seven, together with Ishiguro, then fifty-six, just after the film had been made, Garfield admitted he hadn’t read the novel before being cast, but that it had affected him deeply when he did read it: “I read the script and the novel simultaneously and, gosh, it’s like you’ve been stabbed in the back from the first line, but you don’t realize it until the last 20 pages. It stays with you and upsets you. You wake up in the morning and you feel okay, then you remember Kazuo’s novel and you go, ‘Oh, God…'” On publication of Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro received a postcard from Harold Pinter, who had been involved in the initial development of the script of The Remains of the Day, saying, in his black felt-tip: “I found it bloody terrifying!”

I myself first read Never Let Me Go for review just prior to publication and remember being extremely upset by it. The immediate comparison for me was the shock of reading Pascal as an adolescent and I began the review simply by quoting the famous fragment from the Pensees: “ Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.”

As I said then, these few phrases, once read, cannot easily be forgotten, for they express a truth. To Pascal, it is not necessarily the whole truth, because this is man without God. But for those who are without God, it is a pitiless sentence. I finished the review saying the book was “like Pascal’s paragraph, no more and no less than an image of man’s life, painful to receive, hard to put away.” At the time I reported myself dismayed; I was in shock, it seems now to me. After reading the novel I had disturbing dreams in which I seemed to be in its world myself. However, I was in no doubt at all about the book’s stature and value.

As it happened, that year, 2005 , I had been invited to be a Man Booker judge, a little incongruously since, in my role then as Literary Editor at the London Evening Standard, rather than getting soundly behind all such trade promotions as I should have done, I had annually scoffed at its mishaps, mirthfully calling it a literary harvest festival and saying the judges were being asked to choose between an apple and orange and so forth. The Booker was then in its heyday of influence, not yet diffused by the decision to include American writers.

That year an astonishingly large number of good novels were published. Among those on the longlist that did not even make our shortlist were books by Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel, Dan Jacobson, and Rachel Cusk. Rejected at that meeting also, much to my surprise, were novels by Ian McEwan (Saturday) and J.M. Coetzee (Slow Man) that surely would have featured in any other year. The shortlist comprised John Banville (The Sea), Julian Barnes (Arthur & George), Sebastian Barry (A Long Long Way), Ali Smith (The Accidental ), Zadie Smith (On Beauty)— and Never Let Me Go.

I had long admired Ishiguro at this point. I had reviewed several of his novels and I had interviewed him relatively early in his career, shortly before An Artist of the Floating World was published, in February 1986, for the Literary Review. At the time I wrote there regularly, prized not only for my rare critical acumen but because, on taking office, the editor Auberon Waugh had promised the magazine’s readers that there would be SEX on every cover and my byline helped out with that rash pledge.

Nonetheless, the interview, in which I asked Ishiguro a great deal about his Japanese heritage, did not appear until January 1987, because it turned out that Bron Waugh, perhaps honoring his father’s prejudices, did not believe a Japanese author could possibly write English and was only persuaded otherwise after the novel had won praise and prizes.

Before the final Booker judging process began, I read Never Let Me Go for the second time, on a day-long ferry from St. Malo to Portsmouth, and was taken by it all the more, although reduced to tears. So, despite the strong competition, I felt sure that Ishiguro should and would win. But at the meeting to decide on the day of the prize there was deadlock. Lindsay Duguid, longtime fiction review editor at the TLS, backed Ishiguro too. But the forceful writer and bookseller Rick Gekoski strongly supported the Banville, and he was backed by the Irish novelist Josephine Hart. The discussion was protracted as long as possible that afternoon but ended with no resolution.

Finally we reconvened at a room in the Guildhall, shortly before the ceremony was to begin. The chair of the judges, until then not showing his hand, Professor John Sutherland, asked us whether, if he cast the deciding vote, we would all abide by it. We had got on well, time was up. We all said we would. Then Banville wins, he said. The next day Boyd Tonkin of the Independent wrote: “Yesterday the Man Booker judges made possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest.” I think he was right.

It can only have been a slight career hiccup to Ishiguro. He has always said he had “one of the easiest rides any author can have in recent English literary terms,” helped both by good reviews and by winning, or being shortlisted for, prizes with each book. “I’ve been fantastically lucky,” he has said. “Especially as I’ve made very few concessions to commercialism, so I couldn’t complain for one moment.” Never Let Me Go has now sold well over two million copies, been translated into many languages, and become a GCSE set text.

Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017 and in 2018 he was knighted for services to literature. Sir Kazuo holds Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun, 2nd Class, Gold and Silver Star, too. Still, it was the wrong decision, one I felt abashed about having endorsed every time I saw somebody earnestly reading The Sea on the tube, on the bus, in the following months.

In a rapidly written article, Rick Gekoski (later, incidentally, in 2015, instrumental in selling Ishiguro’s literary archive to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas for $1m) defended our decision in the Times in a piece headed “At last, the best Booker book won.” Gekoski acknowledged John Banville’s The Sea had been pre-eminently his choice, calling it “one of the few submitted novels worth reading for the quality of the prose itself, which both demanded and repaid re-reading, spreading out in implication and richness the more one contemplated it.” He had read the book five times before the final meeting, he said, enjoying it more each time. It was “a complex, deeply textured book, with wonderful, sinuous and sensuous prose” in the high modernist tradition of Nabokov and Beckett.

One of the repeated criticisms of lshiguro’s work remains that the prose is plain and flat. Revisiting Never Let Me Go, Rachel Cusk termed it his “‘dead hand’ approach.” In a peculiarly dim review of Never Let Me Go in the London Review of Books, Frank Kermode recognized that the prose was appropriate to the character of Kathy but found the writing less engaging than in Ishiguro’s previous books: “Everything is expertly arranged, as it always is in Ishiguro, but this dear-diary prose surely reduces one’s interest.”

Ishiguro has himself pointed out how different his writing is from that of his more demonstrative contemporaries. “I can’t write those marvelous sentences, like Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie, that crackle with vitality. I do get a great writerly kick out of reading writers at that sentence level, but I suppose I only respect novelists who have a powerful overall vision. I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.”

From so courteous a man, that’s quite a kick. “As a writer I think I’m almost the antithesis [of Rushdie],” he has even said. “The language I use tends to be the sort that actually suppresses meaning and tries to hide away meaning rather than chase after something just beyond the reach of words. I’m interested in the way words hide meaning.”

He owns that his relationship to the English language “has always been a slightly less secure one than would be the case for someone who was brought up entirely by English parents.” But if he does write a “careful, cautious English,” it is, he says, no bad thing perhaps, citing the example of Beckett, who chose to write in French because it disciplined him. “It is very easy for your own mastery of the language, your familiarity with the language to actually undermine your artistic intentions.”

At times, Ishiguro, a worker-hero of world book tours, has stated that he quite deliberately writes novels for international audiences and so has become hyper-conscious of what does not translate (he’s “haunted by the Norwegians,” he jokes). But he is selling himself short here. Having previously told one of his repeat interviewers, Bryan Appleyard, this, he told him recently, rather more suggestively: “The surface of my writing has to be simple, otherwise I become incomprehensible.”

In an encounter with the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, he explained: “There’s a surface quietness to my books… But for me, they’re not quiet books, because they’re books that deal with things that disturb me the most and questions that worry me the most. They’re anything but quiet to me.”

__________________________________

From David Sexton ’s introduction to Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Reprinted by permission of Everyman’s Library, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Introduction copyright © 2023 by David Sexton .

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Never Let Me Go

Kazuo ishiguro, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Never Let Me Go: Introduction

Never let me go: plot summary, never let me go: detailed summary & analysis, never let me go: themes, never let me go: quotes, never let me go: characters, never let me go: symbols, never let me go: theme wheel, brief biography of kazuo ishiguro.

Historical Context of Never Let Me Go

Other books related to never let me go.

Full Title: Never Let Me Go
When Written: 2004
Where Written: London, England
When Published: 2005
Literary Period: the 21st-century novel
Genre: bildungsroman; science fiction; speculative fiction
Setting: Various locations in England, in the 1990s
Climax: Miss Emily reveals to Tommy and Kathy that there is not, nor has there ever been, a “deferral” available for clone couples who are “truly in love.”
Point of View: first-person

Extra Credit for Never Let Me Go

Film version. In 2010, a film of Never Let Me Go was released, with performances by Carey Mulligan (Kathy), Keira Knightley (Ruth), and Andrew Garfield (Tommy). The adaptation received mixed reviews.

Book review: “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go can be read on three levels.

It can be approached as a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of science. It can be seen as a metaphorical examination of slavery and exploitation.

To my mind, though, it is best viewed as a meditation on the human condition.

Which is odd — but, first, let me warn you that I’m going to be talking about some aspects of the novel that are unveiled slowly in its pages.

There are strong hints early, and the outlines of the world in which the characters live are there from the beginning. Nonetheless, if you want to be able to approach Never Let Me Go with completely fresh eyes, you should avoid going any further into this review.

The novel is well worth reading and pondering.

As I was about to say above, it is perhaps a bit odd for me to think of Never Let Me Go as a meditation on the human condition since its three main characters — Kathy H., Tommy D. and Ruth — aren’t human at all.

Or, at least, they aren’t seen that way, or think of themselves that way.

In the first paragraph, Kathy H., the book’s somewhat artless narrator, mentions that she is a carer, and a good one. She explains:

My donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as ‘agitated,’ even before fourth donation.

So, within the novel’s first 10 sentences, the reader is introduced to a vaguely unsettling jargon: “carer,” “donor,” “recovery” and “donation.” As the story unfolds, other terms are added to this vocabulary: “possible,” “normal,” “model” and “complete.”

Different darker echoes

These are words that, in our everyday lives, have particular meanings. Here, however, they hold different darker echoes.

Similarly, the “here” in Never Let Me Go seems very much like our everyday world. But it’s not.

Ishiguro has envisioned an alternative existence where, in the aftermath of World War II, scientists made major breakthroughs in defeating cancer, heart disease and other human ailments through the use of clones.

These are a class of people who aren’t people. They are created through an undescribed process so that, as young adults, their organs can be harvested for use in true humans, the normals. As teenagers, Kathy H. and her friends face this future with a gallows humor:

[T]he idea of things ‘unzipping’… [became] a running joke among us about the donations. The idea was that when the time came, you’d be able just to unzip a bit of yourself, a kidney or something would slide out, and you’d hand it over. It wasn’t something we found so funny in itself; it was more a way of putting each other off our food.

The process

Kathy H. and those like her don’t refer to themselves as clones. They seem to have no generic name for their kind. Yet, they are raised with the increasing knowledge of their task in life, and they exhibit no rebellion.

The novel is set in England in the late 1990s, and the use of clones is more than three decades old.

The process is this: They are raised apart from normals, and given schooling that emphasizes the importance of keeping healthy. By their late teens or early twenties, they begin training as carers.

A carer is a kind of a social worker for a caseload of donors. Your tenure in the job can be relatively short if no particular aptitude is shown. By contrast, Kathy H. is 31, and has been a carer for more than 11 years, just about the outer limit of holding that job.

After serving as a carer, you become a donor. From then on, you live in a recovery facility. An organ is removed, you recover, and then it’s time to donate another.

Some “complete” after only the first or second donation. Which is to say, they die. If you make it to the fourth donation, you know that it will result in your completion.

The normal world tries to close its eyes to the harvesting and ultimate killing of these clone people. The process makes possible great health improvements for normals, so, for the most part, uncomfortable questions aren’t asked.

It is in this way that Never Let Me Go is about laboratory breakthroughs gone wrong. And about the victims of an exploitative society who are used and abused because they aren’t fully human. Shades of American slavery.

Yet, Never Let Me Go is more than a metaphorical expose or a science fiction story.

Kazuo Ishiguro

At one point, when they are teens, Tommy D. finds Kathy H. paging through a pile of pornographic magazines. Watching her, he can tell that she’s not looking at the naked bodies but concentrating from page to page to page to page on the faces of the people.

She is looking for her “possible.”

Written by : Patrick T. Reardon

For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.

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Hi, thanks for the comprehensive review. I think Ishiguro “cheated” by writing from a clone’s point of view. By showing us the inner feelings and inner life, of course we conclude that they have souls–we take that as a given. Perhaps that’s part of the point, I don’t know. Related to this, the question formed in my mind as I was reading: “Who is Kathy writing to?” I think the journal/writing itself that she is recording is a better testament to personhood than the artwork that some of the reformer guardians were trying to collect. Again, maybe this too is part of the point.

Charlie —

You make a good point. I think Kathy’s journal is better evidence of personhood than the artwork though both seem to go a great way toward proving that point. As for the soul — if there’s anything this present age has taught us, it’s that the givens of the past, the common wisdom, the understanding of what constitutes something (a marriage, say, or the creation of a baby) are being turned on their heads. I guess something that can think and feel and is self-aware whether a clone or a machine or whatever — well, where do I get off saying that’s not a person with a soul.

Never Let Me Go

By kazuo ishiguro.

This is a science fiction, dystopian novel that was published in 2005. It depicts a world in which individuals are cloned for the sole purpose of harvesting their organs.

About the Book

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro is a science fiction, dystopian novel that was published in 2005. It depicts a world in which individuals are cloned for the sole purpose of harvesting their organs.

Kazuo Ishiguro is a British writer who was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954. He’s also regarded for his screenwriting, music, and short stories. He’s one of the most important fiction writers in contemporary literature, having been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature for his novels.

Never Let Me Go and Kazuo Ishiguro

‘Never Let Me Go’ is one of his better-known novels. It was nominated for the Booker Prize (one of four times the author has been nominated for this prize). It is also regarded as one of the best novels of 2005 and one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.

The novel is set in a dystopian version of late 20th-century English and is narrated by a woman named Kathy, who is a clone created for the sole purpose of harvesting her organs. She spends much of the novel recalling her time at Hailsham. This real area of English is transformed in the novel into a seemingly idyllic but mysterious boarding school in the English countryside. There, the novel examines her complex relationships with two key characters, Ruth and Tommy.

The novel gradually unveils the truth about the characters’ lives and how they adapted to the knowledge when it was revealed to them.

The author’s writing is perfectly depicted in this novel. It is often characterized by its emotional depth, use of subtle prose, and often unreliable narrators, like Kathy herself. Kathy spends much of the novel trying to make sense of her life and the world she inhabits.

Books Related to Never Let Me Go

If you’re interested in exploring books related to Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go,’ you should explore dystopian fiction more broadly. Books like ‘Oryx and Crake’ and ‘ The Handmaid’s Tale ’ by Margaret Atwood are fantastic choices. Both novels depict a realistic future in which the world is very different from reality. ‘Oryx and Crake’ is part of the “MaddAddam” Trilogy. It explores genetic engineering, biotechnology, and their impact on society in a way that readers of ‘Never Let Me Go’ are likely to enjoy.

‘ The Giver ’ by Lois Lowry is another great option. Although written for young adults, the novel remains widely popular. It features a seemingly utopian society and explores memory and societal control in a way that’s reminiscent of Ishiguro’s writing.

Readers might also be interested in:

‘Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep?’ by Philip K. Dick – this well-loved novel (which was adapted into the movie “Blade Runner”) explores what it means to be human in a world populated by androids.
‘ The Road ’ by Cormac McCarthy – This beautiful and deeply sad novel explores a post-apocalyptic future in which a father and son struggle to survive.
‘ Brave New World ’ by Aldous Huxley – This is a classic choice and a well-loved novel that depicts a future society in which individuals are genetically engineered and conditioned for specific roles in society.

Legacy of Never Let Me Go

Ishiguro’s contribution to literature has been widely recognized. His works have received numerous awards, and, as noted above, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. ‘Never Let Me Go’ is still a fairly recent novel, but despite having been published less than 20 years ago, it’s already become a part of school reading curricula around the world.

The novel is studied for its many unique themes and the author’s skilled writing style. It’s likely that the public’s enjoyment of the novel will only grow as time passes, and the suggestion that it’s one of the best novels of the century will endure. It is also certain to remain relevant, particularly as discussions around genetic engineering, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence continue to grow in contemporary society.

The book was adapted into a film in 2010 starring Carey Mulligan as Kathy, Andrew Garfield as Tommy, and Keira Knightly as Ruth, bringing the story to a wider audience.

Never Let Me Go Review ⭐️

‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro was published in 2005 and is regarded as one of the best books of the early 20th century.

Never Let Me Go Historical Context 📖

This is an early 21st-century novel that is just as relevant now as when it was published in 2005.

Never Let Me Go Best Quotes 💬

‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro is a haunting contemporary novel that features a number of compelling quotes about humanity, memory, and childhood.

Never Let Me Go Characters 📖

This is a deeply sad novel that features a few key characters, all of whom are connected to Kathy’s youth and present experiences.

Never Let Me Go Themes and Analysis 📖

This is a science fiction novel that was published in 2005. The book explores a wide variety of themes, like humanity, love, and loss.

Never Let Me Go Summary 📖

This is a moving novel published in 2005. It explores a dystopian reality in which clones are commonplace and created for the sole purpose of using their organs to save the lives of non-clones.

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Review: Never Let Me Go By Kazuo Ishiguro

The student news site of Moravian University

The Comenian

Book Review: “Never Let Me Go,” by Kazuo Ishiguro

Sara Weidner , Community Section Editor | February 4, 2018

Photo via Google Images under Creative Commons License.

In his novel, “Never Let Me Go,” Kazuo Ishiguro offers an alternative historical timeline where the breakthrough of medical science has already occurred.

Science fiction novels sometimes miss the mark with capturing the attention of the general public due to their high-tech themes and scientific terminology, which can make it a somewhat intimidating genre.

Ishiguro successfully breaks this genre barrier by making “the other” portray human emotions and actions.

The main character, Kathy H., spends her days looking back instead of forward. The time spent with her teenage friends Tommy and Ruth at the English boarding school-like Hailsham seem a distant memory, bittersweet and poignant.

All the students at Hailsham have been told, and not told, who they are and what their overall purpose is.

They are clones who exist only to provide organ donations when necessary. They, along with all the other clones, known as “students,” live at Hailsham, an institution where they focus on their health and are encouraged to create art.

All students first become Carers, who take care of those in the process of giving donations before they become Donors themselves. By the end of the novel, they discover that the purpose of their art is to prove whether or not they have souls, thus justifying their humanity and right to humane treatment.

After their Hailsham days, the trio lives at The Cottages until they receive their notice to begin their Carer training. It is rumored that students at Hailsham are special in that they might be able to receive a deferral if a couple can prove they are truly in love. If accepted, they would be granted a few years together before starting their Carer training.

Kathy, now a Carer, travels the English countryside from recovery center to recovery center before she is unexpectedly reacquainted with her childhood friends. Once the three reunite, old memories emerge, bringing smiles and sentimental reminiscing. However, not all memories are pleasant and soon an old feud with Tommy at the core arises and creates tension between Ruth and Kathy.

In the end though, the three realize what truly matters most, and learn the solemn truth that dictates their lives.

By presenting the ethical issue of cloning in narrative fiction, the novel allows the topic to become more relatable to an audience that might not be familiar with the scientific and medical jargon surrounding cloning. “Never Let Me Go” is a clone narrative that forces readers to confront the ethical and moral implications of human cloning, what it truly means to be human, and tests the power of true love as never before.

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Something About Kathy

By Louis Menand

Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” (Knopf; $24) is a novel about a young woman named Kathy H., and her friendships with two schoolmates, Ruth and Tommy. The triangle is a standard one: Kathy is attracted to Tommy; Tommy gets involved with Ruth, who is also Kathy’s best friend; Ruth knows that Tommy is really in love with Kathy; Kathy gets Tommy in the end, although they both realize that it is too late, and that they have missed their best years. Their lives are short; they know that they are doomed. So the small betrayal leaves an enormous wound. As is customary with Ishiguro, the narrator, Kathy, is ingenuous but keenly desirous of telling us how it was, the prose feels self-consciously stilted and banal, and the psychology is not deep. The central premise in this book is basically the same as that in the book that made Ishiguro famous, “The Remains of the Day” (1989): even when happiness is standing right in front of you, it’s very hard to grasp. Probably you already suspected that.

It is always a puzzle to know where Ishiguro’s true subject lies. The emotional situation in his novels is spelled out in meticulous, sometimes comically tedious detail, and the focus is entirely on the narrator’s struggles to achieve clarity and contentment in an uncoöperative world. Ishiguro is expert at getting readers choked up over these struggles—even over the ludicrous self-deceptions of the butler in “The Remains of the Day,” the hopeless Stevens. But he is also expert at arranging his figurines against shadowy and suggestive backdrops: post-fascist Japan, in “A Pale View of Hills” (1982) and “An Artist of the Floating World” (1986); an unidentified Central European town undergoing an indeterminate cultural crisis, in “The Unconsoled” (1995); Shanghai at the time of the Sino-Japanese War, in “When We Were Orphans” (2000). It seems important to an understanding of “The Remains of the Day” that the man for whom Stevens once worked, Lord Darlington, was a Fascist sympathizer. But it is not particularly important to Stevens, who has no political wisdom, and who is, in any case, preoccupied with enforcing his own regimen of emotional repression.

The shadowy backdrop in “Never Let Me Go” is genetic engineering and associated technologies. Kathy tells her story in (the novel says) “England, late 1990s,” so the book seems to belong to the same genre as Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” counterfactual historical fiction. Conditions in this brave-new-world Britain, and exactly how Kathy and her friends fit into them, are all spooky authorial surprises, and (as is the case with most things) when you’re reading the novel it is best to begin without too many prior assumptions. Kathy is a “carer”; her patients give “donations,” occasionally as many as four. Inch by inch, the curtain is lifted, and we see what these terms mean and why the world is this way. The strangeness, like the strangeness in Ishiguro’s most imaginative novel, “The Unconsoled,” is ingeniously evoked—by means of literal-minded accounts of things that don’t quite add up—and teasing out the hidden story is the main pleasure of the book. In “The Unconsoled,” the story is never fully sorted out; at the end, we remain in the hall of mirrors. Unfortunately, “Never Let Me Go” includes a carefully staged revelation scene, in which everything is, somewhat portentously, explained. It’s a little Hollywood, and the elucidation is purchased at too high a price. The scene pushes the novel over into science fiction, and this is not, at heart, where it seems to want to be.

But where the novel does want to be is even less obvious than usual. Ishiguro is praised for his precision and his psychological acuity, and is compared to writers like Henry James and Jane Austen. In fact, he says that he dislikes James and Austen. He also says that he has never been able to get beyond the first volume of Proust; it’s too dull. On the other hand, although his novels are self-consciously “set,” they are not historical novels, and the facts don’t seem to interest him very much. Ishiguro was born in Japan, but his parents moved to England with him when he was five. He cannot speak Japanese very well; he has not expressed any particular admiration for Japan or its culture; and he set his first two novels in Japan without revisiting the country. He appears to have done some research for “When We Were Orphans”; but in “Never Let Me Go,” even after the secrets have been revealed, there are still a lot of holes in the story. This is not because things are meant to be opaque; it’s because, apparently, genetic science isn’t what the book is about.

Ishiguro does not write like a realist. He writes like someone impersonating a realist, and this is one reason for the peculiar fascination of his books. He is actually a fabulist and an ironist, and the writers he most resembles, under the genteel mask, are Kafka and Beckett. This is why the prose is always slightly overspecific. It’s realism from an instruction manual: literal, thorough, determined to leave nothing out. But it has a vaguely irreal effect.

Beckett’s subject, too, was happiness, and, though Ishiguro’s characters seem so earnestly respectable, they have the same mad, compulsive, quasi-mechanical qualities that Beckett’s do. There is something animatronic about them. They are simulators of humanness, figures engineered to pass as “real.” What it means to be really human is always a problem for them. Can you just copy other people? Would that take care of it? “I have of course already devoted much time to developing my bantering skills,” Stevens explains at the end of “The Remains of the Day,” “but it is possible I have never previously approached the task with the commitment I might have done.” Genetic engineering—the idea of human beings as products programmed to pick up “personhood skills”—is a perfect vehicle for a writer like Ishiguro.

For reasons that belong to the story’s secret, the characters in “Never Let Me Go” all feel obliged to create works of art. Tommy is slower to develop creatively than his schoolmates, and when he starts to make drawings they are pictures of animals. He finally shows them to Kathy:

I was taken aback at how densely detailed each one was. In fact, it took a moment to see they were animals at all. The first impression was like one you’d get if you took the back off a radio set: tiny canals, weaving tendons, miniature screws and wheels were all drawn with obsessive precision, and only when you held the page away could you see it was some kind of armadillo, say, or a bird. . . . For all their busy, metallic features, there was something sweet, even vulnerable about each of them.

The passage almost certainly derives from Henri Bergson’s famous definition of comedy: the mechanical encrusted on the living. The creatures Tommy draws are imagined versions of himself. They are funny and pathetic at the same time, because people behaving like wind-up toys, even when they can’t help it, even when it makes them fall down manholes, make us laugh. This is why Beckett is a comic writer, and it’s why Ishiguro’s novels, though filled with incidents of poignancy and disappointment and cruelty, are also, weirdly, funny. His sad characters can’t help themselves. ♦

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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro ★ Book Review

August 13, 2021 by Tassara · Leave a Comment

Hi, friends! Thanks for joining me today; I’m so glad you’re here 💙. Today I’m sharing my review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel: Never Let Me Go . I didn’t really love this one, and I was hesitant to write a mostly negative review, but it ended up being an interesting case study, and I’m really proud of how this review turned out. So, let’s talk about it, shall we?

A quick note: I do get into some moderate spoilers in this review, but I’ll repeat what I said in my May 2021 Wrap-Up . I firmly believe this is the kind of book where spoilers may lend themselves to better expectations and a better reading experience. That said, if you want to remain completely unspoiled, you’ll want to skip the “Is Never Let Me Go Science-Fiction?” and ” What Moral Quandaries Does the Book Attempt to Address?” sections.

And now, on to the review!

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars

Originally Published in 2005

Genre: Literary Fiction

Features: BIPOC Author

Support a local bookstore (and this blog!) by purchasing Never Let Me Go on Bookshop.org .

I read this book as part of my 2021 Reading Challenge. Check out all the books I’m reading for the challenge ･ﾟ✧here✧ﾟ･ .

Any place beyond Hailsham was like a fantasy land; we had only the haziest notions of the world outside and about what was and wasn’t possible there.

What is Never Let Me Go About?

Never Let Me Go is Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel that follows three friends during and after their time at Hailsham, a unique and secretive boarding school. Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth have never known a world outside of Hailsham, but their lives inside are pretty complete. They take classes in the arts and sciences, play sports, and even have Sales and Exchanges.

Sales are one of the only opportunities for Hailsham students to get a glimpse of the outside world. Discarded and secondhand items are brought to Hailsham for students to pick from so they can make their dormitories feel more like home. Small comforts such as cute pencil cases and portable cassette players make their restrictive lives more endurable.

The Exchanges, though, are another thing altogether. These are seasonal art shows wherein Hailsham students present their original artwork for other students to purchase using tokens. The highest honor one can receive at an Exchange is to have their work taken away from school by Madame. The students believe that Madame has a gallery full of their artwork, though they can only imagine for what purpose.

Kathy and her cohorts may not know what to think of the outside world, but they can’t help but wonder what the outside world thinks of them…

We all sensed that to probe any further — about what [Madame] did with our work, whether there really was a gallery — would get us into territory we weren’t ready for yet.

Where Never Let Me Go Misses the Mark

Never Let Me Go has a lot of fascinating ideas and a few moments of brilliant writing. Unfortunately, it fails to truly succeed at any one thing. Some books (and series) can be described with the phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Never Let Me Go is a book full of clever but disparate parts that create an incoherent whole.

The world-building wavers between inconsistent and nonexistent. The main characters are one-dimensional and difficult to invest in. The writing’s few shining moments are overshadowed by manipulative narrative choices. This creates a sense of uneven, distracted pacing, which, in turn, only serves to make the entire story feel unfocused.

Intangible, general impressions of a book, such as its pacing and broader story elements, can be challenging to quantify in a written review. Even still, the characterization, narrative style, writing choices, and themes give us plenty to discuss.

So, let’s unpack that.

Inconsistent main characters

Guiding us along this zig-zagging journey through memory is our narrator, Kathy. Given that this is her story, one can only assume that Kathy is supposed to be, you know, likable. Unfortunately, that turns out to be quite the task. She first introduces herself in a statement that assumes the reader, who knows nothing about her or her world, must be jealous of her cushy life.

My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years… I’ve developed a kind of instinct around donors. I know when to hang around and comfort them, when to leave them to themselves; when to listen to everything they have to say, and when to just shrug and tell them to snap out of it… I can understand how you might get resentful — about my bedsit, my car, above all, the way I get to pick and choose who I look after. And I’m a Hailsham student — which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up.

Kathy then spends the rest of the book alternating between a passive observer in her own story and an active participant in highly questionable behavior. One of Kathy’s best friends is Tommy, a boy she befriends at Hailsham after standing up for him against some relentless bullies. Her other best friend is Ruth, a vindictive girl whom Kathy allows to bully Tommy. Apparently, Kathy only has a backbone when it services the plot.

Ruth is not a good person. She starts dating Tommy to prevent him from getting between her and Kathy; she’s mean-spirited and she keeps secrets from her friends to hold them over their heads. Still, Ruth has one of the most intriguing plot points in the book when she tries to find her “possible.” (Put a pin in that 📌.) Ruth is not easy to like. But she’s not supposed to be. So, in a way, Ruth is probably the most successfully written character in the book. It’s just a shame she’s designed to be insufferable for most of the story.

How retrospective storytelling hurts Never Let Me Go

Firstly, the detached, retrospective narrative style hurts the book because it keeps the reader at arm’s length from the story and its narrator. Kathy is, and always has been, resigned to her fate. (Put a pin in that, too 📌.) She does not invite the reader to share her experiences. She merely recounts events from her life, shrugs, and says, “do with that what you will.”

In a book that is supposed to focus on its characters, an emotionally unavailable narrator is a nearly insurmountable obstacle on the course toward emotional investment in a story.

Another way this narrative style hurts the book is that it removes any real tension between our characters. Kathy reveals that she reconnected with Ruth during her time as a carer and alludes to her experiences with Tommy when it was his turn to become a donor. So, any time the three of them appear on the brink of irreversible fallout, we know it won’t be forever. We know they’ll eventually get to patch things up in the end.

Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose… the instant I saw her again, at that recovery center in Dover, all our differences — while they didn’t exactly vanish — seemed not nearly as important as all the other things: like the fact that we’d grown up together at Hailsham, the fact that we knew and remembered things no one else did.

Non-chronological and non-traditional narrative styles can work. However, if not done well, this style can quickly become a gimmick — and a crutch. The author gives themselves license to randomly insert plot twist-type reveals without doing any legwork to earn those reveals earlier in the story. The book may not have actually been as clever as it tried to be in this regard. Still, manipulative storytelling isn’t less manipulative just because it’s done poorly.

Is Never Let Me Go science-fiction?

So, the short answer to this question is: no, this book is not science-fiction. The long answer is: kind of, but still not really. Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate present where society has perfected and implemented human cloning for the purposes of organ harvesting. Sounds interesting, right? Well, Kazuo Ishiguro doesn’t think so.

He does not explore the world that created or coexists with a society of clones bred for the express purpose of having them one day “willingly” “donate” their organs. That lack of exploration might have been acceptable if Ishiguro was consistent about it. Instead, he info-dumps a bunch of retroactive exposition in chapter twenty-two of a book that’s only twenty-three chapters long.

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls… we did it to prove you had souls at all… Most importantly, we demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being. Before that, all clones — or students, as we preferred to call you — existed only to supply medical science. In the early days, after the war, that’s largely all you were to most people. Shadowy objects in test tubes.

This exposition comes when Kathy and Tommy are trying to cash in on an opportunity to delay their organ donations (put a pin in that, too 📌), but it changes nothing. Information that should have altered the way Tommy and Kathy looked at their entire childhoods gets a shrug and a resounding “well, darn.”

What moral quandaries does the book attempt to address?

The short answer to that question is: none. The long answer is: well, still none, but the book does a lot of mental gymnastics to make the reader think it’s addressing something .

Remember all those pins we stuck into this review in previous sections? Time to break out the bulletin board because Kazuo Ishiguro wants to teach us a lesson.

📌 #1: The Possibles Are Endless

The first moral quandary Never Let Me Go fails to address is that of the power of indoctrination. None of the characters in the book ever question the apparent inevitability of their fates. This might be understandable and a relevant theme to explore if Ishiguro chose to keep the characters in their ideological echo chambers for the entirety of the story. But he doesn’t do that.

The first pin we stuck into this conversation was on the topic of Ruth trying to discover her “possible.” A “possible” is the person whom a clone thinks may be the source of their DNA. Ruth attempts to locate her possible after she leaves Hailsham and before her time as a carer. Stalking her doppelganger through town shows the group how much like “regular” people they are. Though none of them seem interested in why, if they are so much like “normal” humans, they can’t also live a normal life.

Hailsham was unique in many ways. However, it was not unique in allowing its students the chance to taste normalcy for a few years after “graduating.” Thus, the bubble of indoctrination bursts. If the students never got that taste of normalcy, it would be easier to buy that they never attempt to obtain liberation from their fates. But that’s not the case. The book fails to prove that indoctrination works. Instead, it demonstrates that its characters have a passing curiosity about the world around them but no interest in actively engaging with it.

📌 #2: We Live in a Society

The second predicament Never Let Me Go attempts to address is how society determines which lives are sacred. In this world, society now cares so much about the right to life that they can avoid relying on using the organs of the recently deceased to provide life-saving transplants. They do this by breeding other, different humans and killing them slowly and prematurely for this express purpose.

Once again, this might have been an interesting theme to explore if Ishiguro had been consistent about it. Instead, he has the teachers from Hailsham school conduct an experiment to prove that cloned humans do, in fact, have souls and feelings. They can, in fact, experience the joys of an actual, meaningful, human existence. But, alas, the experiment failed, and the fates of the Hailsham students remained unchanged.

There are people out there… who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you… The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment. It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.

C’est la vie; we tried; we believe you have souls, says the book, but it’s not us you have to convince. It’s the others, that nameless, faceless society that doesn’t think you have souls. Thus, we will do nothing to help you escape your brutal fates.

That’s gonna be a yikes from me, dawg.

That’s just one idea, though. There is, potentially, another way to interpret the book’s message here.

📌 #3: Delays Have Dangerous Ends

(There’s a Shakespeare reference for all my theatre kids in the audience.) The last moral dilemma Never Let Me Go fails to address is the whole clones’ rights situation. The final pin we stuck into this conversation was on the topic of Kathy and Tommy’s attempt to delay their donations. To be clear, they are not trying to avoid their fates altogether. They simply want to wait a few years before dying a slow and painful death to save other peoples’ lives.

They track down some old Hailsham folks to find out if the whispers about deferrals are true. Unfortunately, they learn, those whispers were only rumors. Upon hearing this, they make no attempt to challenge this assertion or stand up for what they might reasonably perceive as an injustice against them. They simply shrug and say, “we tried,” before returning to business as usual.

Tommy and Kathy want to live badly enough to pursue a rumor about deferring their donations, but not enough to take their situations into their own hands and do something to avoid their inevitable fates. That could have been an excellent opportunity to analyze the power of groupthink and indoctrination, but, well… see above.

Ultimately, each of these pins boils down to the following questions: does Never Let Me Go have a bad take? That is: does the book want us to think clones are not real humans; therefore, we shouldn’t pity Tommy and Kathy’s inability to defer their donations? Or, does this book want us to emotionally invest in characters who aren’t very much invested in themselves? Either way, it’s… looking rough.

Why Never Let Me Go Might Still Be for You

Whew, that was a long list of complaints, I know. If you’re still here… bless you. I’m not mad at Never Let Me Go ; I’m just… disappointed. I don’t want it to seem like I thought this book was horrible, though. So, I’d like to finish this review by calling out a few of the book’s redeeming qualities.

Firstly, Kazuo Ishiguro is undoubtedly a talented writer. Despite my issues with the narrative choices, there are still moments where his writing shines through. Sometimes this happens in moments with very layered character interactions. Sometimes, as in my favorite passage in the book (below), he creates a scene with breathtaking imagery.

Secondly, as I’ve been saying since my May 2021 Wrap-Up, the book isn’t really about the plot. Even if you read this entire review, spoiler sections and all, you could still really like this book if you tend to like introspective, stream-of-consciousness narratives in general. Read a few chapters and, if you find yourself connecting to Kathy, you’ll most likely enjoy this book a lot more than I did. Especially since you won’t be expecting the sci-fi elements to go anywhere.

The woods were at the top of the hill that rose behind Hailsham House. All we could see really was a dark fringe of trees, but I certainly wasn’t the only one of my age to feel their presence day and night. When it got bad, it was like they cast a shadow over the whole of Hailsham; all you had to do was turn your head or move towards a window and there they’d be, looming in the distance. Safest was in front of the main house, because you couldn’t see them from any of the windows. Even so, you never really got away from them.

Letting Go of Never Let Me Go

Wow, we made it, folks. We’ve arrived at the conclusion. Have you read Never Let Me Go or anything else by Kazuo Ishiguro? If so, what did you think?

If you made it to the end of this review, I really want to thank you for sticking around and hearing me out. I hope my “this would have been interesting, but…” statements clarified why this book missed the mark for me, but didn’t discourage you from picking this up if its premise interests you!

Personally, even though I was disappointed by Never Let Me Go , I still plan to read Ishiguro’s 1989 novel, The Remains of the Day . I’m also a huge film fan, and seeing that its adaptation received so many Academy Award nominations has me intrigued on several levels.

I’ll be back soon with another blog post, so keep your eyes peeled for that! In the meantime, you can keep up with my reading on Goodreads , where you can find me at @tassara_txt, or follow my other social media: I’m on Instagram as @thepaladinpages, Twitter as @tassara_exe, and Pinterest as @tassara_jpg.

As always: thanks for reading, and I’ll see you soon. 💙

You can also read my reviews on Goodreads. Check this one out ･ﾟ✧here✧ﾟ･ .

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Clone alone

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 263pp, Faber, £16.99

The children of Hailsham House are afraid of the woods. In the days when their guardians were much stricter, the school myth goes, a boy's body was found there with its hands and feet removed. Sometimes that dark, threatening fringe of trees can cast such a shadow over the whole school that a pupil who has offended the others might be hauled out of bed in the middle of the night, forced to a window, and made to stare out at it.

When not applying peer pressure in this curious way, Hailsham children seem to have a nice life. The school places considerable emphasis on self-expression through art and, especially, on staying healthy. There are frequent, exhaustive medical check-ups. Smoking is a real crime, because of the way it can damage your body. Yet despite the care lavished on them, their world has a puzzlingly second-hand feel. Everything they own is junk. Teaching aids are rudimentary. Sometimes you get the feeling they're being taken care of on the cheap.

In fact, they are; and their fear of the woods reflects, in a distorted but fundamentally accurate way, their fate. They're organ donors, cloned to be broken up piecemeal for spares. The purpose of Hailsham is to prepare them for their future - to help instal the powerful mechanisms of self-repression and denial that will keep them steady and dependable from one donation to the next.

Never Let Me Go is the story of Kathy and Tommy and Ruth, and of the love-triangle they begin at Hailsham. Ruth is the controlling one, Tommy is the one who used to find it hard to keep his temper: they hope that love will save them. They've heard that love - or art, or both - will get you a deferral. Kathy - well, Kathy is a carer by nature as well as profession: she watches her friends break themselves against the inevitable, but never lets them go. After Hailsham, they grow from puzzled children to confused young adults. They live in a prolonged limbo, waiting for the call to donate. They're free to wander. They write essays, continue with their artwork, learn to drive, roam Britain looking for their "possibles" - the real human beings they might have been cloned from.

Their lack of understanding of the world is funny and touching. They stare into the window of an ordinary office, fascinated by the clean modern space. "It's their lunch break," Tommy says reverently of the office workers, "but they don't go out. Don't blame them either." The clones look in at the society that made them, failing to understand its simplest social and economic structures.

As readers we're in a similar position. What Kathy doesn't know, we have to guess at. This sometimes excruciating curiosity propels us along; meanwhile, Ishiguro's careful, understated narration focuses on the way young people make a life out of whatever is on offer. Nothing is more heartbreaking than received wisdom, and Hailsham students, carefully sheltered not just from any real understanding of their fate but from any real understanding of the world in which it will be acted out, have nothing else to go on.

Their sense of suspension, in a present where they neither make nor understand the rules, is pervasive. Childishly snobbish about the proprieties, they're as puzzled by what's proper as anyone else. Small fashions of behaviour come and go. Far into adulthood Kathy, Tommy and Ruth dissimulate and bicker and set teenage behavioural traps for one another.

Inevitably, it being set in an alternate Britain, in an alternate 1990s, this novel will be described as science fiction. But there's no science here. How are the clones kept alive once they've begun "donating"? Who can afford this kind of medicine, in a society the author depicts as no richer, indeed perhaps less rich, than ours?

Ishiguro's refusal to consider questions such as these forces his story into a pure rhetorical space. You read by pawing constantly at the text, turning it over in your hands, looking for some vital seam or row of rivets. Precisely how naturalistic is it supposed to be? Precisely how parabolic? Receiving no answer, you're thrown back on the obvious explanation: the novel is about its own moral position on cloning. But that position has been visited before (one thinks immediately of Michael Marshall Smith's savage 1996 offering, Spares). There's nothing new here; there's nothing all that startling; and there certainly isn't anything to argue with. Who on earth could be "for" the exploitation of human beings in this way?

Ishiguro's contribution to the cloning debate turns out to be sleight of hand, eye candy, cover for his pathological need to be subtle. So what is Never Let Me Go really about? It's about the steady erosion of hope. It's about repressing what you know, which is that in this life people fail one another, grow old and fall to pieces. It's about knowing that while you must keep calm, keeping calm won't change a thing. Beneath Kathy's flattened and lukewarm emotional landscape lies the pure volcanic turmoil, the unexpressed yet perfectly articulated, perfectly molten rage of the orphan.

By the final, grotesque revelation of what really lies ahead for Kathy and Tommy and Ruth, readers may find themselves full of an energy they don't understand and aren't quite sure how to deploy. Never Let Me Go makes you want to have sex, take drugs, run a marathon, dance - anything to convince yourself that you're more alive, more determined, more conscious, more dangerous than any of these characters.

This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn't about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It's about why we don't explode, why we don't just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.

· M John Harrison's latest novel is Light (Gollancz)

Booker prize 2005
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ISawTheScience

Science Through Stories

Book Review: Never Let Me Go

This book review is part of a new series called the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Library. Each month, Science Centre Singapore staff read a non-fiction or science fiction title together and gather to discuss the science and art of literature. In April 2024, we read Never Let Me Go by Kashuo Ishiguro.

TL;DR – Suffer emotional damage through love, loss, and the human condition.

Never Let Me Go is a story best read without knowing anything about the plot. What I can say without giving anything away, is that it will leave you feeling like an open wound on the last page. It is a story about what makes us human. It is a story about our soul – what even makes our soul? It is also a story about how two people were in love and only got together much later, only to realise that not only did they have little time left, but had wasted all the time in between.

To expand on the science (or science-inspired) elements however, we would have to reveal some key plot points. Spoilers ahead!

Set in an alternate reality of England in the 1990s, we start at the formative years of our three main characters’ lives: Kathy H., Ruth and Tommy. From ages seven to fifteen, they are enrolled in a special school, Hailsham, which we later learn is a school for clones. Yes, human clones, similar to clone troopers in Star Wars. This is however not obvious to the readers, nor even obvious to the characters themselves until later on in the novel. Scientifically of course, human cloning is not (yet?) possible and it is unlikely we’ll see a copy of ourselves in the flesh any time soon. The closest we could think of was artificial intelligence, but even that is far from these characters.

So what is the sole purpose of these clones’ existence? Organ donation. This, again, is not as obvious, but it does get hinted at throughout the first half of the book until later explicitly mentioned. The students appear to be ‘normal students’ with lessons, breaks and the regular friendship drama. It’s the teachers who give it away as they shelter the children from the ‘outside world’, focus on maintaining good health, and emphasize proper sex education, all to ensure they are at peak health for organ donations while reminding them that they will never have a future.

As one of Hailsham’s teachers mention, “They have been told, and yet not told.” This opens the doors to moral and ethics. Have these children been brainwashed? Conditioned to accept their fate? Why do they not have a choice?

In the later part of the book, we also find that the teachers had been occupied with political matters. Readers can infer that there is a political debate to the question: Should these clones be treated humanely? It is no doubt that they are humans. They breathe, eat, and have emotions.

Then, there’s the question about the soul . All through their schooling years, the students are highly encouraged to express their creativity and every masterpiece is chosen to be exhibited in hopes to stir politics within their favour. In a twist of interpretations, Tommy and Kathy believed that the art was proof of their capability to love and showed what their souls were like. However, the teachers used their art to prove that the students had souls at all . To date, the soul is still a science debate. If anything, it may highlight the limitations of physical sciences.

Various scenes come up throughout the novel where we see the characters desperately grasp on to their humanity. All of which will guarantee to make you feel something and make you question what it means to be human and to be your own individual. Is it all biology? Is it more?

When the characters are old enough, they ‘graduate’ from students to ‘carers’ where they care for their older peers who have begun donating, until finally they receive a letter for their first donation. The book never states how exactly the system ‘decides’ that a character is ready to donate, nor do they mention which specific organ gets donated. The clones just continue to donate until they ‘complete’, which may be a cynically nicer way to mean death. It is heart-breaking to realise that a definition for ‘complete’ is ‘to have all necessary or appropriate parts’ — the complete opposite for our characters. Others might say that they have indeed ‘completed their task.’

While Never Let Me Go did not explore too deeply into the Sciences, many ethical and moral questions have definitely come out of it. It leads to the evergreen dilemma: We can, but should we? These questions are even more so heightened when told through the narrator, Kathy H. as we see her grow up, explore her emotions, and love.

Up next we have Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

Written by Lydia Konig

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