Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro wrote Remains of the Day, which I read and loved last summer. He won the Nobel prize in 2017. This is the second work of his I’ve read. I wish I could say I enjoyed it.

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but has lived since age five in England and writes in English. Like Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go is set in England and is narrated in first person by a single character.

The narrator, Kathy H. tells her story in the late 1990s. She tells us she’s thirty-one in the opening sentence. The novel is divided into three sections. Section one is Kathy’s memories of her years in what seems to be a boarding school named Hailsham. Section two covers a few years after she finishes school in her late teens where she hangs out in a place called The Cottages with other young people including two friends from Hailsham, Tommy and Ruth. Section three covers recent events. Kathy lives alone. For eleven years she has worked as a sort-of chaplain called a “Carer”, which involves driving herself around England to visit people in hospitals, including both Tommy and Ruth.

From the opening sentence the reader realizes that Kathy’s world is not exactly ours. What exactly is a Carer, and why are the people she visits called, “Donors”? There’s mystery about Hailsham as well. Why is there so much emphasis on student’s doing creative work and little real academics? Who is the woman called “Madame” who appears each month to take away the children’s best art and what is the “Gallery” where she takes it? Why are the adults at Hailsham called “Guardians” rather than teachers? Parents and families are never mentioned. The children are divided into Juniors and Seniors, but there’s also a section called Infants. Are there babies at Hailsham? The children are forbidden to leave the grounds and there’s never talk of school holidays.

I don’t like story-telling that withholds information from the reader. I find mysteries like these to be more annoying than beguiling. So it was a relief finally, on page 81 when the scenario begins to become explicit. I’m not giving anything away because it’s not hard to guess, and the novel, from 2005 was made into a movie in 2010. The children have no parents because they are clones. They were created to serve as organ donors. After reaching adulthood they will give up their bodies in surgical procedures to prolong the lives of normal people. Eventually the surgeries will kill the Donors which is known as “completing.” We learn by the end of the novel that Hailsham was set up by philanthropists hoping to give the doomed children a more comfortable life. The art work and the gallery were the philanthropist’s attempt to prove to outsiders that the children have “souls” and should therefore be treated with human dignity. But the campaign was a failure. By the time Kathy H. tells her story Hailsham has been closed and the newer clones are raised in warehouse conditions.

It’s creepy. But I don’t buy it. I kept scowling at the book and asking questions. If the philanthropists believe the clones are fully human then why was their aim to make them comfortable rather than to end the abusive program? Why is there no campaign of public protests against the practice? Even Kathy and her friends don’t complain. No one objects. Kathy has use of a car but she never thinks of escaping. When asked to report to hospital and start their donations the characters just submit. Maybe passivity is true to these particular characters but surely they would have heard rumors of other clones trying to resist.

Instead we get a story of Tommy and Ruth becoming a couple. Then Tommy and Kathy become a couple. They have a false idea that if they can prove they’re in love that the donation process can be deferred a few years. The novel is drawn out as the mysteries are resolved little by little. But there’s not much real story here beyond explicating the scenario. A more straight-forwardly told short story would have been more satisfying.

A further frustration with the mystery device is that there doesn’t seem to be any logical reader that Kathy would be writing this novel to. She addresses the reader as “you.” But if the reader is inhabiting the same world as Kathy then the reader already knows the situation about clones and donations and so on. There’s no mystery to solve, only waiting for Kathy to wise up. But how can Kathy not already know the truth herself? Even if the Guardians at Hailsham are trying to shield the clones from the truth they couldn’t keep a secret like that. The clones never leave Hailsham but we’re told they have access to books, even a television set. Are we to believe that they never saw a documentary or a news report that mentions the clone program? Kathy specifically mentions reading Daniel Deronda, The Thousand and One Nights, and The Odyssey, and she mentions other authors including James Joyce so she knows about regular human nature. (In George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda the title character discovers late in the novel that he has Jewish ancestry; he is not what he thought he was. Might not that revelation provoke in Kathy a similar curiosity to question her own assumed identity?) Surely the Hailsham students would ask about parents. Surely they would ask about making plans to apply to university and prepare for their futures and if the Guardians answered ambiguously it would only heighten their curiosity. Kathy’s a smart girl. Didn’t she ever read about human rights?

The best science fiction is that which uses imagination to make some point about reality. You might say that Ishiguro’s story is a complaint against factory farming or human slavery or a warning against scientific innovation getting ahead of ethics. You might say that Ishiguro’s clones are meant to be models for our own lives. We are all just as doomed as Kathy and her friends. As we grow up we’re told something of the truth of our mortal situation but we don’t really understand. And once we know, there’s nothing to be done about it. We don’t protest. We can’t escape. We think perhaps a love affair might offer temporary relief. At best we can only care for each other until it’s our own turn to “complete.”

But I don’t buy that either. The front pages of the paperback I read include blurbs from several reviews of the book. The one from The New Yorker compares Ishiguro to Kafka and Beckett. I read Beckett’s trilogy last summer, and indeed, Malone Dies takes place in a hospital with a patient waiting to die that seems to be a metaphor for the situation of life all of us are in, not unlike Ishiguro’s characters. But life is more than just waiting to die. Ishiguro’s passive clones don’t have the freedom of will that makes life a personal adventure. Without that element his analogy, if that’s what he intends, fails. Beckett’s story is both more stark and more absurd and shorter and thus more powerful. Ishiguro’s passive characters and mild prose undercut the terror. And because Ishiguro’s scenario is presented in more detail the holes are more apparent and more irritating. In the end, Never Let Me Go doesn’t feel profound, only pathetic.