Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
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Book Reviews of Never Let Me Go
Book Review: A Promising, Beautiful, Yet Perpetually Frustrating Novel
Summary: 3 Stars
Nearly 600 reviews here for Never Let Me Go. What can I possibly add to the discussion?
A few things.
*** Mild spoilers ahead ***
First, I love Ishiguro. He's an outstanding writer. The Remains of the Day is perhaps the greatest novel about unrequited love ever written in the English language. But even Ishiguro is a master at only a few themes. Simply put, his best works are about characters who are unable to break free from their predestined paths. They can be constricted by Victorian manners (such are the protagonists in Remains of the Day), or they are constricted by an inescapable understanding that they will will live very short lives (as the protagonists in Never Let Me Go). The idea to break free and escape never occurs to any of these charaters in Ishiguro's finest works. England might as well be a maximum security prison - a giant gray Alcatraz. And no matter what, none of his characters dare lose their dignity.
Never Let Me Go is not science fiction, nor is it a dystopia novel (like 1984). The best way I can put it is that it is a brilliant short story or novella, expanded to novel length if for no other reason than to let the reader soak-in the sterile, gray environments the protagonists inhabit. The novel is written as a free form memoir, with a terribly irritating literary device. The narrator, Kathy H., has a habit of getting ahead of herself, telling us of a crucial turning point or event, but forces herself to backtrack in order to set-up the next major point (usually expressed as "I'll return to that later" or "more on that later"). And when she does divulge the details of this major turning point, it is usually a creepy, awkward conversation between her and one of her two closest friends, Tommy or Ruth. It becomes quite clear that these characters have a radically isolated and skewed worldview. For them (or at least Kathy H.) major events are not graduations, or moving to a new residence, or even death. No, major events are spilling secrets and making the occasional error of saying too much or being too harsh towards one's somewhat distant friend. In other words, they are totally old school British schoolchildren in a bubble. These schoolchildren inhabit an alternate England - one that has advanced science far greater than the real postwar UK.
Never Let Me Go has scenes from this alternate England that you may never forget. The empty rural roads and service stations where Kathy H. finds peace driving her car. The perpetually gray skies. The refuse and trash collecting in the trees and barbed wire in a field somewhere in the east. The casual, passionless relationship the characters have with sex and death. The stiff upper lip attitude of wanting to make it to one's fourth 'donation'. It really is a brilliant work if you accept the argument that it is a dystopian story that avoids going into any details of the dystopia.
In other words, this is not Children of Men. The Europe in this novel might be in the midst of a serious public health crisis, but Never Let Me Go neither hints at one nor explains what it might be. Or Europe might be so prosperous, so technologically advanced, that the creation of these children might have seemed as natural as any advancement in a First World society. Ishiguro gives nothing away, expect for a key line about how science advanced so quickly after 1946 that there 'was no time' to consider the morality or logic of those advancements. In other words, England had become a well mannered monster. By 1996, England was consuming living, breathing, beautiful children as easily as stocks were traded on the FTSE. These children will be throughly educated, grow up, experience two years of independent, sexually liberated life, and then work to fulfill their predetermined destinies. And this England, as you might expect, seems quietly proud of that achievement, despite having 'no time' to ponder the consequences. Because, I suspect, more important things in English society must be maintained. There are cricket matches and afternoon tea parties to attend, after all. Carry on, you English. I am certain Ishiguro is attracted to that theme given the similarities to 20th century Japan's adherence to honor, dignity, and constrained mannerisms.
That alone is highly disturbing and original. And while I suspect Ishiguro was inspired by Dolly the Sheep in 1996, others with more sinister agendas have already looked to this novel for ideological ammunition. Opponents of embryonic stem cell research and abortion see parallels in this novel. They see how a society, with good intentions of advancing health and science, can destroy perfectly good lives. The difference they cannot escape, however, is that the children in this novel are not in a lab or in a uterus. But I am just rubbed the wrong way when I see 'Antis' flocking to a book by a secular British man as a source for their petty arguments.
But as Kathy H. might say, let me return to what I was saying about the novel itself.
I feel like such a picky reader when I complain that this could have been a novella or short story. As great and elegant a writer as Ishiguro is, even he has no serious justification for the length of this work. There is much creepiness and some suspense, but no tension. Rather it is a largely atmospheric work. At least the book gives us two amazing sequences, the road trip to Norfolk, and Tommy's moment of rebellion and passion (which may very well reflect the frustration of many readers of this book). Even a quiet, introverted student like Tommy has to let it all out when he (and we) discover that we were told so much and at the same time, so very little.
But there is a glimmer of hope - the 2010 movie directed by Mark Romanek. Not only will the story line be tighter, it might play better in the medium of cinema, despite offering no answers as to what happened to this alternate world.
And of course, that is Ishiguro's point. This novel is intended to make us think about our real world and our lives. For succeeding at that, I give him tons of credit. For reprising his themes of people locked in their manners, bubbles, and fates, I also bestow him much credit. But for stretching it to 287 pages, I feel I must deduct stars.
Book Review: Soulful Potboiler
Summary: 2 Stars
While this novel belongs to the twenty-first century, its background biological fiction belongs to the nineteenth, contiguous to the background of Shelley's Frankenstein (1831) or Wells' Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Also, outside biology, Never Let Me Go accumulates more incoherencies, begged questions and general disbelievabilities than any three novels by Jules Verne.
This accepted, the novel's background is a present-day England and Wales where, after WW2, advanced transplant practices would have become a major social fact, and an untold number of children would have been raised from birth to be (nothing but) transplant donors. The narrator, Kathy, is one such future organ bank. Her and her peers' belief is that they have been produced by cloning from particular individuals (each different, perhaps for genetic variety). What is certainly true is that they are made infertile as infants.
It is impossible to tell whether Kathy and the donors she knows are a special category among donors, or simply a typical group among donors of that age. (This is one of the hundreds of questions that go begging and for which Kathy shows no concern at all.) However, for that group at least, childhood is spent in special orphanages from which they never go out until they leave at sixteen. There is then a limbo period where they are lodged in more open surroundings and begin to interact with "normals" outside their previous supervisors, especially in outings where they pass for normals. These one, two or three years end with their decision to become donors immediately or, more commonly, to spend some time first as "carers".
Supplying an explanation where Ishiguro does not, I surmise that it is much preferred that organs be cropped on need from the living donor. There are a maximum of three living donations, and death is simply the last donation (at best the fourth), known as the "complete". There seem to be several years from one donation to the next. The organs must be in perfect health. If after a donation the donor's health declines, then she or he completes early. She may also request that from psychological lassitude. The function of carers is to provide psychological support so that recoveries go better and the full run of separate donations can be achieved.
From their first donation until completion donors live in one smallish institution, among many in various spots of England or Wales. Novice carers are attached to one residence, but those with more experience travel by car from donor to donor. Kathy is an exceptional carer, having reached twelve years' experience, and the age of thirty-one. The novel is the biography she puts down, hopefully for other carers, before her first donation. She does not live in an institution but in an ordinary bedsit somewhere, which is rather rare. Most people who take up caring last very few years in that function, because of poor competence or psychological stress. Some do not even learn to drive, a sign that they intend to be carers only for a small spate.
All question-begging aside, as a work of literature the novel has several flaws. Kathy is not very bright, and these are 250 pages of not-very-bright prose. Even at that, the naivety of the earlier parts is a psychological impossibility once we know what she has learned later, but before putting pen to paper. The first two thirds of the novel are concerned with her five last years at the orphanage and her first year or so after that. One character comes to dominate these two thirds, Ruth, a duplicitous point-scorer who has cornered dim Kathy into being best friends with her. The impression is that Ruth has taken over the novel because Ishiguro does not have a very clear idea of what he wants to do. But the final third, relating Kathy's last year, is worse. Here, Ishiguro provides three "resolutions". First, Ruth Confesses Her Wrongs Before Dying (completing). Second, Many Mysteries Are Clarified (more or less) in a yet-more-unlikely interview. Finally, Kathy is At Last Reunited with Her Original Sweetheart, from whom Ruth has kept her away all those years -- for a while after his third donation (shades of Evangeline). Structurally the entire work belongs to the young-readers section.
Never Let Me Go's literary point, however, is foreign to its novelistic structure. It is an inborn atmosphere, never stated, but to my mind pointed to by the title (which Ishiguro does not explain except as a song title from the fifties). "Never let me go", or the equivalent converse, "may I never let you go", is what no donor can say except in an evanescent romantic dream. Just has they have no parents and will have no children, donors are taught very early that they do not "have" a body, they're carekeepers for one. Likewise, at the same age they learn that they have no future in the sense of an unknown fate to be built. More accurately, they learn that all of them have one definite future, as if they were cattle with awareness. So the entire tone of the novel, at several depths, is detachment. Because the individual and collective future of donors is a given, they are not very attached to any person (including "normals" they may have sex with), to any endeavor, to any accomplishment except caring, to any possession, to their own feelings or indeed to any choice. From the earliest age their life is to Let Go. That is the singular sentiment made concrete by 250 pages in Kathy's voice.
I bought this book because of a not quite accurate review by Anita Desai in the Sept. 22, 2005, New York Review of Books. On the face of it Desai is a much better writer than Ishiguro, and her review is a more memorable literary work than the novel it discusses. My feeling is that, given the material in the last paragraph, Ishiguro could have written an excellent short story. But it would have brought in not one hundredth of the money the novel will bring in, and indeed it would have been little noticed. As it is, the story is drowned in a pre-adult nineteenth-century novel, scandalously indifferent to any hint of science, and all that survives is the tone: detachment.
Book Review: Reads easily even as it leaves the reader deeply disturbed.
Summary: 5 Stars
The narrator of Never Let Me Go Kathy H, is a thirty one year old carer in an alternative 1990s Britain. The plotline of the novel follows the fairly simple story of her recollection of a love triangle which began while she was a teenager at the exclusive but now defunct Hailsham House where she was schooled and, it would appear, raised. The story seems mundane enough at first. Girl loves longstanding male bestfriend, but subsumes her love when it becomes clear that her female best friend is also interested in the same boy. Kathy's narrative is clean and matter of fact, full of the detail of day to day school day memories. The story of love lost and regained which drives the narrative forward is one which has been played out in love songs (like the fictional "Never Let Me Go" song which Kathy takes to) for as long as love songs have been written. But this is no ordinary coming of age story. Nor is it really about a love story, although the whole concept of love, and artistic power is one which sets off the sinister underlying elements of the story. It takes about 70 pages or so of hints before the reader is made aware that neither Kathy, nor her love interest Tommy or best friend Ruth are `like us' -- usual characters in the sense that the realistic matter-of-fact guise of this novel might indicate. What the reader finally becomes aware of, more or less concurrent with the narrator, is that the characters are clones, `created' rather than born, solely for the sake of providing replacement parts for `humans,' a `species' to which these people clearly do not belong.
And yet, of course they are exactly like us. They hunger, desire, are moved by beauty and feel pain in exactly the same way. And of course however they may have come into being, they have all the same neuro-linguistic perceptions as anyone might. Somehow, and somewhere, one imagines a kind of parental set - the persons, scientists or whatever who have created them, and who has the responsibility for their existence. These missing characters form part of the novel's setting - the backstory and backdrop which is never revealed. The gods which created Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are missing from the novel, along with any kind of reference for morality. Not quite missing however are those people after whom the clones are created--the "possibles" -- and there is a kind of touching nostalgia of the sort that an adopted person might feel for his real but utterly inaccessible parents among the characters for their possible. In his usual delicate and understated way, Ishiguro creates an extraordinary tension between the many dichotomies in the setting of this story that begins to take priority over the love story as the novel moves forward. The first point of climax occurs when Kathy sees the head carer of Hailsham, "Madame," crying in her doorway after witnessing her dancing with her pillow to an old tune, the "Never Let Me Go" of the title.
For the reader, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy are simply characters, and it is Ishiguro's skill as a writer that the dichotomy between their obvious humanness and the non-human nature of their roles begins to sit uncomfortably at the back of the reader's head. The three characters' growing self-awareness and sense of being different coupled with the learned inevitably of that difference becomes poignant when Ruth goes in search of her `possible.' It is the closest any of them can get to their origins and so it is a powerful moment of loss and longing when the group of students suddenly sense the impossibility of ever striving to live the kind of lives they are longing for.
The philosophical questions around the ethics of this world, or the terrible use of what are clearly people in this way is hardly raised, with the very brief exception of a last ditch visit made by Kathy and Tommy, in an attempt to get `out of' the donor program - based on a rumour circulated among the donors that anyone who demonstrated `true love' might get let off. The lovers made their pilgrimage, and instead found some semblance of the horrible truth about their existence.
But however present the moral question is in this story, it is never directly raised, and Ishiguro resists the urge to make it obvious. If these people are artistic and capable of love, is their tragedy any greater? If they don't mind their role, is it any less horrible? It's impossible for the reader to take anything other than the position of horrified spectator in this strange world, and the more you think about it, the broader the implications of the questions raised. Because in many ways, this isn't really a distopia about the horrors of organ donation, although there is a certain degree of discomfort at the notion of raising a species, or even animals, for such a utilitarian purposes. But of course the whole issue of technological progress and morality is one which is upon us now, when even faces can be transplanted, and when machines capable of thinking are just around the corner. The morality in this novel is pretty clear, but there are also hints that the book may be showing us more the similarities rather than the differences in the lives of these characters and those of the readers. After all, we are all going to die after a relatively short life of utilitarian work on behalf of someone else, and while we may have the consolations of family which the characters in Never Let Me Go don't, the novel makes our own exertions on the hamster wheel seem almost as futile as Kathy's. It's a chilling notion that makes you want to go berserk just like Tommy.
This is a powerful, expertly written novel which reads easily even as it leaves the reader deeply disturbed. The unanswered questions it raises about what it means to be a human, about the nature of life, and about morality that will resonate with the reader beyond the pages of the book.
Magdalena Ball is the author of Sleep Before Evening
"There is so much beautiful writing here, soaring passages."
Book Review: Haunted me to sleeplessness
Summary: 5 Stars
Ever read a book that affected you so much you kept waking up throughout the night thinking about it? Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is not horror nor can it be classified as the typical science fiction novel, despite the fact that it has a decidedly science fiction premise and ultimately made me horrified for its characters.
Before going any further, I must caution you that if you're even thinking about reading this book - don't watch the movie trailer! It gives too much away. And although I am going to try not to reveal too much in my review; it will be difficult as the very elements that kept me up at night are the ones that would spoil it for you. If you want Never Let Me Go to take you utterly by surprise - stop reading this review and go straight to the book. Although, don't devour it all at once late at night like I did or it will keep you up, and once you do fall asleep, it will be an uneasy night for you.
Never Let Me Go starts out with 31-year-old Kathy H. looking back on her childhood at a private boarding school, Hailsham, and the friends she made there, Ruth and Tommy. She describes innocent-seeming childhood intrigues and on the surface her time at Hailsham, in the English countryside, is bucolic. Likewise, the tone of the book is calm and unhurried; Kathy's point of view is nostalgic but observant. However, their world, Hailsham, and society in general, has a subtle shade of surreal. Although the setting feels like contemporary England, the reality of the book is off-kilter; under the surface something profoundly disturbing lies in wait for these children.
"You've been told and not told," a minor character, a teacher at Hailsham tells the children in one pivotal scene. This aptly describes the experience of reading Never Let Me Go. From the beginning, words like "carer," donation," "donor," and "completion" are woven into the narrative as ordinary terms. What they mean and how they affect the characters are depicted as a matter of course; yet as the children's ordinary existence is slowly, subtly exposed to be extraordinary, the sense of disquiet turns into horror.
"Thinking back now, 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. I'm sure somewhere in your childhood, you too had an experience like ours that day; similar if not in the actual details, then inside, in the feelings. Because it doesn't really matter how well your guardians try to prepare you: all the talks, videos, discussions, warnings, none of that can really bring it home...
All the same, some of it must go somewhere. It must go in, because by the time a moment like that comes along, there's a part of you that's been waiting. Maybe from as early as when you're five or six, there's been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying, 'One day, maybe not so long from now, you'll get to know how it feels.' So you're waiting, even if you don't quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don't hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudders at the very thought of you--of how you were brought into this world and why--and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. 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."
Let me be clear: there is no gore, nothing graphic, nothing explicit - yet the images and the possibilities suggested by Never Let Me Go haunted me to sleeplessness.
***SPOILERS***
For those who've read the book- this is what kept me up at night-
Why did they never try to escape??? It didn't seem from the story as if they had GPS devices on them or anything like that. What could have kept them from hiding out or running away so that they didn't have to provide "donations?" What was astounding was they didn't even want to; it never occurred to any of the characters to do that. The most that they hoped for was to get a "deferral" or to put off their "donations" for 3 years.
For ordinary humans, that is non-genetically engineered ones, the will to live is primal, biological. But these are no ordinary children. As clones, they've been genetically engineered to provide healthy organs for ordinary humans. Further, they've been engineered to be sterile as well. Although, it's never said, I think that the children have been bred to be docile to. If you recall, the first cloned animal was Dolly, the sheep. That's what the characters acted like - docile sheep, both as adults and children. They've been bred and reared to not stray from the herd nor from the path chosen for them since birth.
Towards the end, two of the characters try to get a deferral; the scene is heartbreaking, not only because they were doomed but because even though they were adults in their 30s, their logic and emotional maturity were those of extremely naive and trusting children.
Also, I kept thinking of how many donations the characters could make before "completing." What exactly does that mean anyway? 3 seems to be the number; so what can you donate and still be alive? A kidney, a lung, bone marrow, eyes? Once you get to the liver, pancreas, and heart - well you're pretty much done for. Even the characters didn't know what happened after "completing." Although there is a nebulous fear of existing in a vegetative state somewhere until their remaining organs are harvested, this not knowing is accepted. No one questions it or their fate for that matter.
Book Review: Thought-provoking premise, skillful writing, but author fails to engage deeper meaning, premise is faulted. Moderately recommend
Summary: 3 Stars
As a child, Kathy H. attended Hailsham, an elite boarding school where children were raised to be both healthy and artistic and taught to believe that both their health and creativity were essential to themselves and to the world they would one day enter. Now an adult, Kathy reflects back on her life. She charts the very slow progression of her growth, her friendships with fellow students Tommy and Ruth, and her knowledge, as she herself gradually began to learn about her role in the outside world--and what this role dictates about her identity. A combination of heavy introspection and soft-scifi, Never Let Me Go has a thought-provoking premise and is brilliantly written, but fails to reach its potential, spending all its time in excruciatingly slow buildup and none of it in impact, theory, or debate. Enjoyable, but somewhat empty, and so moderately recommended.
This book's greatest strength is its writing style, but it is also one of the most irritating aspects. Kathy, the narrator, is intensely thoughtful and analytical, breaking down her personal history into eras, important moments, and developing themes. She walks the reader through the story of her life much in the way she lived it, slowly, very slowly, bringing to light her final realizations. In other words, there is a lot hidden in this book, and it takes the book's entire length--literally until the last fifteen pages--to reveal it all. In between are circuitous examples, where Kathy starts to talk about one event, goes back a bit to explain why the event was relevant, explains the event itself, and then goes on without having drawn a major conclusion--instead, she's just mapped another point on her gradual arc or argument. The resulting pace is excruciating, both artful, brilliantly thought-out and executed, and simply painful as the reader is lead along, disappointed, and lead along again. The book's pace bring the characters to life (although both Ruth and Tommy lack some dimension) and, with it, the life that they lived, through Hailsham and beyond. As such, it is the highlight of the book, worked like an artform, but it is also intensely irritating and makes the book (which actually reads quite quickly) seem longer than it is.
There are a near-infinite number of issues, from the ethical to philosophical, that could be brought to question and debate in this book. The very premise almost begs them--both the science of the base culture and the purpose of Hailsham itself. Unfortunately, however, none of these topics are brought to issue in the text. Instead, the book is consumed by the very slow progression of the story, the creep towards the "twist" revelations of who the children are and what purpose they serve. When finally revealed, these revelations are not all that big--not because they lack the potential to be, but because they pale in comparison to the immense buildup that leads to them. The characters just barely exceed the gradual revelation of the book's premise and are largely just passive carriers of the story, and so the other various issues, the possible debates, never enter into the text. So when other reviewers talk about the questions this book raises, what they're really talking about is the potential for questions--and that is not the same thing. The burden of meaning for this book, everything that the reader could take away and continue to think about, rests entirely on the reader, who must pull out the themes and ask the questions himself, carry on the debates himself. The author shirks his responsibility, and the book suffers for it, failing to live up to its potential.
My final complaint with this book is that the underlying concept seems, blandly, unrealistic. **SPOILERS** follow, so be warned: The fact that in the book's contemporary culture the clones are considered non-human despite looking, acting, and living like humans seems entirely impossible. Consider: Humans never viewed the first cloned animals as different than their original counterparts; indeed, we were amazed and drew attention to the fact that they were identical, that they were clones. So why would cloned humans be any different (especially that these clones pass in human society as normal and indistinguishable)? Outside of the huge wastefulness of cloning entire humans just to harvest their organs, the fact that the cloned humans were not considered humans seems unreal to me, no matter who the gene donors were, no matter what brief attempts Ishiguro (though Ms. Emily) makes to justify it. **END SPOILERS** This is the underlying basis of the book's conflict and plot, and so problems with this concept create problems throughout the book. They weaken the foundations, making it difficult to accept the book and, as a result, even more difficult to take on the work of finding and analyzing themes, which the author fails too do. In the end, Never Let Me Go has a thoughtful premise with heavy potential for thought, theory, and debate, and it is skillfully, even artfully written, but the book fails to live up to its potential: the author does not tackle his own themes, and no matter how interesting the premise, it is an unreasonable one. I wanted to enjoy this book, and I did, but I felt cheated at the end: the final product was surprisingly empty, with the burden of meaning placed entirely and unfairly upon the reader alone.