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Something About Kathy

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 ‧ 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

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by Kazuo Ishiguro ; illustrated by Bianca Bagnarelli

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BOOK TO SCREEN

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Donna Tartt

SEEN & HEARD

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

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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Review: Never Let Me Go By Kazuo Ishiguro

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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 .

David Sexton

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Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ Is a Masterpiece of Racial Metaphor

Books & Culture

His characters may not be asian, but the book is an incisive commentary on nonwhite experience.

In our new dystopian reality, we rarely get to celebrate good news. Waking up to the New York Times alert about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize win was one of the few truly joyous occasions of 2017. Not only because I’ve been a fan of the Japanese-British author since college, but also his recognition on such a global platform reaffirmed a worldview that needs to be remembered now more than ever.

But I was mystified when, amid the jubilant responses to the Nobel Prize committee’s decision to award Ishiguro, some began openly fretting over the author’s commitment to addressing matters of identity. Interestingly, these critiques tended to originate from within the Asian American community. Citing interviews where the author copped to being “self-conscious about this issue of people taking me literally” in reference to his Japan-centered novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), readers asked: Why did he stop writing novels with Japanese protagonists? Did he pander too much to the white gaze? Is that why he won — because he made himself palatable to white readers? Writers of color often have to negotiate their identities in ways that white writers do not when publishing in America, where the industry is nearly 80% white , and even more so in the U.K .

Ishiguro’s characters explore aspects of nonwhite identity that are actually more incisive and authentic than if they were simply reflections of Japanese culture.

The push for inclusivity may actually help explain why some readers feel let down by Ishiguro’s choices as a writer. In order to find a work that conforms more closely to what’s expected of Asian diasporic literature, we must reach farther back into the author’s oeuvre — to his debut A Pale View of The Hills (1982), which features an immigrant narrative about a middle-aged Japanese woman living in England. Ironically, such pigeonholing would seem to undermine the endeavor of contemporary writers of color to subvert rigid definitions of what they can and can’t write about. As someone who identifies as such, I reeled at the insinuations that the Japanese-born author was somehow less representative of his ethnicity because he has written about white characters, or characters whose race is never explicitly mentioned. In fact, I would argue just the opposite — that Ishiguro’s characters explore aspects of nonwhite identity that are actually more incisive and authentic than if they were simply reflections of Japanese culture.

Ishiguro’s novels frequently grapple with the role of the individual within the confines of society. Over the years I’ve found myself returning to his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go when contemplating the social conditions that continue to persist in our post-9/11, post-colonial, post-racial, post-everything world. The experience of diving into an Ishiguro novel becomes a process of excavation, of uncovering memories that the narrator has meticulously buried over a lifetime. But don’t expect any big reveal; instead, we must be satisfied with fragments of truth. The author’s gift lies in his ability to use those fragments to construct a portrait, which, in the end, resembles something more of a mirror. That truth implicates us as much as it does the characters in their fictional realm.

Never Let Me Go ’s setting, stated simply as “England, late 1990s,” offers an alternative present where cancer and other previously incurable diseases all have a cure — but at some very high costs. Framed as the memoir of Kathy H., now 31, the narrative opens with recollections of her childhood growing up at an idyllic boarding school Hailsham in the English countryside. The narrative paints Hailsham and its remote, pastoral setting as one of a handful of “privileged estates.” Insulated from the outside, the school cultivates a unique culture, where the students’ guardians place a heavy emphasis on the need for creativity over the learning of rote subjects. In this way, we can think of Hailsham as representative of the high culture frequently associated with novels about exclusive educational institutions.

For those fortunate enough to gain admittance into these predominantly white spaces, they must often convince themselves that the bargain is worth it — that to follow the path of assimilation is better than to suggest rebellion. This rings especially true for people of color, who historically have been the ones excluded. The promise of belonging to an elite group proves so intoxicating that the students fail to discern to whom exactly they pledge their loyalty, and at what price. Only later do we the reader understand the types of roles Kathy and her peers are being groomed for.

It is this turn in the novel that begins to undo our perception of the students’ special standing. As the story unravels, we see that the walls of Hailsham do not act so much as fortification against intruders as they do a means of incarceration. The guardians employ psychological tactics in order to quell the curiosity of the students and discourage them from physically escaping. So in spite of the institution’s initial acclaim, Hailsham seems more and more a fraud where the imposition of order upon the student body supersedes the intellectual cultivation of the individual student.

In this brave new world, the technology of human cloning is implemented on a full scale for the harvesting of vital organs. The novel considers the ramifications of treating life as resource. More importantly, it forces us to reevaluate the comparison between the life of the human and nonhuman. But even this classification remains in constant flux. Identity, it seems, is never stable — a belief that’s rooted in the core of Never Let Me Go ’s coming-of-age story.

Because we are never told what race Kathy and her classmates are in Never Let Me Go , I have a hunch that most readers assumed by default they were white. Certainly, this is what the 2010 film adaptation envisioned with its casting of comparably pale and willowy actors, all of whom could be described as very typically “English” in appearance. But it’s entirely possible to read these characters as non-white. Reduced to their mere expendable parts, Kathy and her fellow students represent those marginalized figures of our collective unconscious. Their embodiment of the unspeakable may even be biologically encoded onto their selves. Kathy’s friend Ruth theorizes: “We’re modeled from trash . Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren’t psychos. That’s what we come from.” Because ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty compared to white people in the UK , the source population for these clones would have almost certainly included people of color. And given the very real history of how Western medicine has exploited black bodies specifically , there’s a strong case to be made for Ishiguro’s characters being non-white both figuratively and literally.

From science fiction to reality, the business of organ trafficking has materialized quite literally in non-white countries like China, India, Egypt, and Pakistan. Transplant tourism is a real thing, and its combined ethical dubiousness and questionable legality raise concerns about the commodification of human bodies. Pope Francis called organ trafficking one of the “new forms of slavery,” alongside forced labor and prostitution. For other modern-day metaphors for enslavement, look no further than commercial surrogacy or the indentured servitude sanctioned by our immigration laws. Never Let Me Go transforms the approach to racial subjugation in the name of scientific progress, which has created an entire sub-race of clones to service the needs of the greater whole of society. Just as notions of racial hierarchy have been used to promulgate colonial systems throughout history, the perceived nonhuman status of the clones seemingly justifies their sacrifice. The novel reframes the history of imperialism as a conflict between those considered human and those who are not.

The novel reframes the history of imperialism as a conflict between those considered human and those who are not.

The question of humanness troubles the clones, as well as sympathetic individuals like the guardians. On Hailsham’s mission, one of the guardians Miss Emily proclaims, “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.” The liberal-minded guardians invested in the students’ cultural education not only with the aim of improving their quality of living, but also to establish that their lives were worth saving. Working against the rationalization of science, the guardians looked to the students’ creativity as the truer measure of their being human. “We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls,” Miss Emily informs Kathy, then amending, “Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all .” The insinuation that she could be without a soul does not so much upset Kathy as it confuses her. She remembers a similar incident in her childhood when it occurs to her that an adult might be afraid of who she is:

So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realize 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 shudder 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.

These moments of questioning threaten Kathy’s sense of self. Yet for readers familiar with life in the margins, they merely confirm her humanity.

As highlighted by the value placed on the clones’ artwork, the validity of one’s humanity hinges primarily upon the expression of emotion and the ability of others to read those emotions. This problem of readability extends to the author himself. When Josephine Livingston asks in The New Republic “What’s So ‘Inscrutable’ About Kazuo Ishiguro?” she’s being rhetorical, knowing full well that “inscrutability” is a longstanding Orientalist trope used to dehumanize Asian figures. She quotes Ishiguro’s own words:

Books, articles and television programmes focus on whatever is most extreme and bizarre in Japanese life; the Japanese people may be viewed as amusing or alarming, expert or devious, but they must above all be seen to be non-human. While they remain non-human, their values and ways will remain safely irrelevant. No wonder the British are so fond of the ‘inscrutability’ of Japanese faces.

Ishiguro’s insight into how his own ethnic exterior may be perceived suggests that he is in fact portraying the clones’ struggle through a racial lens. The correlation between the failure of the British to see Japanese people as human and the failure of critics to interpret Ishiguro’s work appears inextricable. In the essay “The ‘Inscrutable’ Voices of Asian-Anglophone Fiction,” The New Yorker contributor Jane Hu goes one step further to establish how Ishiguro’s affinity for “first-person narrators who keep their distance — actively denying readers direct interior access” provides an aesthetic quality indicative of inherent “Asian-ness.” By leaning into the “inscrutable Oriental” stereotype, Asian-Anglophone novelists, such as Chang-rae Lee, Ed Park, and Weike Wang, consciously play with the prejudices of Western readers.

To say that Ishiguro’s writing eschews identity politics   would be a failed reading of those works.

To say that Ishiguro’s writing eschews identity politics — an implication that his most popular novels, Never Let Me Go among them, are somehow safer and therefore less racially transgressive — would be a failed reading of those works. Perhaps his stories resist categorization precisely because they so urgently demand to be read universally. “[F]or me the essential thing is that [stories] communicate feelings,” the author said in his recent Nobel Lecture . He made the appeal that “we must become more diverse,” with the understanding that to “widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first world cultures” means broadening whose stories help define what it means to be human. Boiled down to their essence, his characters beg simply to be seen, to be understood. Reading Ishiguro, I feel both.

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Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - review

‘this book is full of such compassion for humanity’

This is a sad, complex, haunting novel which raises huge questions about family, memory, exploitation and ‘othering’. At its heart, however, is the simple story of a girl growing up to become a woman, and her relationship with her best friend and eventual lover. Like The Buried Giant, the clarity and poignancy of the way these relationships are portrayed is arrestingly powerful, and lingers unsettlingly in your mind. I was driving along not long after finishing this book when a song lyric invoked the novel, and I felt a sudden, unexpected, almost physical stab of pathos for Cath, Tommy, and Ruth.

The story is split into three parts: one describes the characters growing up in a country boarding house called Hailsham; one recalls the time they spent at the Cottages; the last third is about their splitting up and final coming back together, as adults. I was reminded of the way the goddess of magic, Hecate, is sometimes pictured as having three aspects: a youthful maiden in the morning, a matron at midday, a withered, ancient crone in the evening. This echoes the loss of innocence Cath undergoes in the story, although she is also sympathetic precisely because her destiny in this nightmarish, dystopian world precludes the possibility of becoming a mother or growing old naturally. Kazuo Ishiguro also draws on ideas of rebirth which challenge this simplistic structure.

Another subtle and interesting feature is that the ‘Cottages’, though the shortest section of the book, and in one sense merely a transition or buffer stage, do represent something separate from both just Hailsham and being a ‘Carer’, just as true adolescence is not just a souped-up childhood or undeveloped maturity…

Many aspects of the story will be convincing for anyone: the casual, unthinking cruelty of children in the playground; the fleeting way alliances are made and abruptly severed between young people; how sex changes dramatically as a topic several times in our lives. One of Ishiguro’s strengths as a writer is his ability to write clearly and unpretentiously about these.

The novel is frightening and disturbing at many levels – Kazuo Ishiguro continuously drip-feeds the reader small details which are cause for disquiet (although events or characters with particularly sinister significance are often introduced innocuously). This technique works like introducing sinister music in a film a little before the moment of horror. For this reason, like the characters themselves, the reader always has a creeping realisation of what is really going on, sometimes long before the story really catches up – Cathy’s long, meandering memories, which brilliantly and subtly convey both her stream of consciousness and the random association of ideas (you get the sense constantly that she is trying to impose meaning, a pattern, a narrative, onto fragments of recollection) both contextualise things for the reader and serve as titbits to delay reveals or to throw the reader of the scent. They also strangely seem to mirror the processing of writing a novel itself, in a similar way to how some of Simon Armitage’s poems reflect the process of writing poetry. Perhaps the most sinister aspect of the novel is the way it reflects ourselves back at us. In this world, the cost of a world free from cancer and diseases is, in human terms, catastrophic, but, as one character asks, how can we go back to a world where these diseases cause so much suffering and indignity? In the same way, our trade off for the luxury of development and the necessity of ending poverty seems to be locking us into a cycle of dependency on fossil fuels. Let alone the thought of where our cheap clothes, technology – and the raw materials which build them – come from. I’ve never quite encountered such a well-written fictional account of cognitive bias – the way we modify our beliefs or our behaviour to avert the guilt or discomfort at holding two self-contradictory beliefs in our mind at once – at society’s level. This alone makes this a precious book indeed. The spike in anti-migrant and anti-Muslim hate crime in a post-Brexit Britain, not to mention the rise of Donald Trump in the US or the far right in Europe, has been a salutary reminder of the need to always avoid ‘othering’ human beings; this book is full of such compassion for humanity it must surely be a worthy antidote. The idea of letting the technological or medical genie out of the bottle without considering the full moral, social and environmental implications is as relevant and haunting today as it has ever been.

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Never Let Me Go Audio CD – Unabridged, April 12, 2005

• Print length 9 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Random House Audio
• Publication date April 12, 2005
• Dimensions 5.08 x 1.1 x 5.91 inches
• ISBN-10 0739317989
• ISBN-13 978-0739317983
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Audio; Unabridged edition (April 12, 2005)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Audio CD ‏ : ‎ 9 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0739317989
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0739317983
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.08 x 1.1 x 5.91 inches
• #30,172 in Books on CD
• #46,132 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
• #144,515 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Kazuo ishiguro.

KAZUO ISHIGURO was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and moved to Britain at the age of five. His eight previous works of fiction have earned him many honors around the world, including the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Booker Prize. His work has been translated into over fifty languages, and The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, both made into acclaimed films, have each sold more than 2 million copies. He was given a knighthood in 2018 for Services to Literature. He also holds the decorations of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from Japan.

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Customer reviews.

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Customers say

Customers find the emotional tone deeply emotional, honest, and chilling. They also find the content thought-provoking, staggering, and quiet. However, some find the plot disattached, overwhelming, and distracting. Opinions are mixed on the writing quality, pacing, and characters. Some find the writing wonderful on many levels, while others find it slightly amateurish. Readers also disagree on the paciness, with some finding it moving and others finding it almost deadening.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the emotional tone deeply emotional, thought-provoking, haunting, and sad. They also describe the book as tender, moving, and heartrending.

"...Equal parts dystopian thriller, bildungsroman, penetrating psychological portrait , love story, and psychosocial examination, it is told through the..." Read more

"...It is a heart ripping story , but it doesn’t fall on you all at once, as if the author, having mercy on his readers, throws some hopes here and there...." Read more

"...Throughout the work, Kathy comes across as friendly, matter of fact and honest --but she is not strictly speaking, a trustworthy narrator...." Read more

"...Let Me Go, overall, the story, characters and ending just left me feeling numbly hopeless ." Read more

Customers find the content thought-provoking, intelligent, and thrilling. They also say the understanding of their purpose develops well over the course of the book. Readers describe the story as compassionate, matter-of-fact, and honest. They say the descriptions of past behavior are revealing and the accomplishment seems nearly staggering.

"...This moving, compassionate story offers germane insights , and for this reader, will never let me go...." Read more

"...“Let me tell you why that happened next…” And the overall premise is also compelling and interesting...." Read more

"...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...." Read more

"...It's a wonderful example of modern literature and completely unique in the fact that we read the most unspeakable horror and swallow it up, wide-..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the writing quality of the book. Some find it wonderful on many levels, elaborate yet with deceptive simplicity. They say it creates a subtle, almost suspenseful undertone. However, others find the writing to feel slightly amateurish and irritating. They also say the narrator is irritating and the story is chilling.

"...these children's lives are revealed elaborately yet with deceptive simplicity by Ishiguro ...." Read more

"...The author’s writing style was especially beautiful and captivating to me...." Read more

"...I initially found the writing to feel slightly amateurish and really felt that I was going to begin to dislike the novel, but as the pages turned I..." Read more

"Ishigiro's Never Let Me Go is beautifully written and the character development is excellent...." Read more

Customers are mixed about the pacing. Some mention they love the overall flow of the book and the characters, and find it moving and powerful. They also appreciate the uncomplicated rhythms and voice. However, some customers feel the tone is muted and the exposition appears to drag. They mention that the book has constant obvious transitions between each section and chapter.

"...What gives us a soul? What is the meaning of an individual life? This moving , compassionate story offers germane insights, and for this reader,..." Read more

"This book moves slowly , slowly, and we wait for moments of revelation that should be accompanied by sudden passion, emotion, but instead the things..." Read more

"...sense of normalcy that is something completely unexpected and ultimately more moving ...." Read more

"...I'm usually not a huge fan of "adult" fiction. It moves too slowly for me , and I'm not interested in the characters as much as I am in those found..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the characters in the book. Some find them deeply developed and realistic, while others say they seem totally unconcerned and disinterested.

"Ishigiro's Never Let Me Go is beautifully written and the character development is excellent ...." Read more

"...In addition, the main characters are strangely passive ...." Read more

"...And the VOICE the narrator has is SO REAL I've often got myself wondering if that's what a real author is supposed to be like, to write like...." Read more

"...writer's skill that four stars seemed required, but I felt distanced from the characters ...." Read more

Customers are mixed about the emotional intensity of the book. Some mention that the characters are calm and resigned, creating a sense of normalcy. However, others say that the book lacks emotional fervor and intelligence, with limited interpersonal relationships.

"...The actual interpersonal relationships portrayed are also very limited ...." Read more

"...What Ishiguro's novel so marvelously does is create a sense of normalcy that is something completely unexpected and ultimately more moving...." Read more

"...wasn't a sympathetic character, but somehow I had trouble channeling her emotional connection to the events of her life...." Read more

"...Never Let Me Go is presented in a quiet , reflective way, and, because of that and it's first person narrative, it's more poignant revelations are in..." Read more

Customers find the plot disattached, boring, predictable, and too planned. They also say the climax is anticlimactic and the literary device is irritating. They say the book is interesting but lacking in backstory.

"...The movie trailer felt absurdly like it was undermining the beauty of the book by dismantling the exalted subtlety of the narrative and replacing..." Read more

"...The novel is written as a free form memoir, with a terribly irritating literary device ...." Read more

"...And, it did and didn't. The climax was a bit anticlimactic and the characters brought in to meet with the two heroes seemed flat (while empathetic)..." Read more

"...The first part is pretty boring , and nothing really happens. In fact, it is just a way of presenting life at Hailsham...." Read more

Customers find the book confusing at times, with many questions left unanswered. They also say the author uses simplistic tactics to add mystery and suspense, making the story boring and predictable. Readers also mention that the premise feels like a thin gimmick and the universe is not self-consistent.

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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.

More Questions than Answers

There is no proper explanation for many points.

• Although ‘Madame’ explains this at the end to an extent. Hailsham was part of a failed campaign to show that the donors were fully human and so deserved human rights. Many other donors were raised in inhumane conditions.
• Presumably, the guardians thought they were helping the human rights campaign or making the donors’ lives less awful.
• Ishiguro hand-waves this. Supposedly, society decided the medical benefits were more important than the human rights abuses.
• That the church, in particular, would go along with this seems inconceivable.
• See discussion below.
• Does the fact that the donors will die mean their lives are pointless?

The lack of explanation makes you think about the issues, and that’s the point. The thing is, Never Let Me Go isn’t really about rational stuff. It’s not about making perfect sense in the real world. In the end, it’s a gigantic extended metaphor.

The children’s lives are a metaphor for all human life. We all know we’re going to die, but still we go through our lives either not thinking about it, telling ourselves stories about how we can avoid it, or in flat out denial.

When mortality forces us to recognise death, such as when a loved one dies, we react with horror, but swiftly move on, cloaking the unpleasantness with euphemism (“passed away”, for example).

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.

Want to Read It?

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

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

Agree? Disagree?

If you’d like to discuss anything in my Never Let Me Go  review, please  email me.  Otherwise, please feel free to share it using the buttons below.

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Time to Go, Joe

Biden needs to step aside—for the sake of his own dignity, for the good of his party, for the future of the country.

Listen to this article

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Sign up for The Decision , a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.

President Joe Biden needs to end his campaign. The first presidential debate, held last night, was a disaster. It was clear from the outset that Biden looked old, sounded old, and yes, is in fact very, very old.

This has been rumored for a while. Last night, it was confirmed.

Panic seemed to set in among Democrats within minutes of the candidates taking the stage—on social media, at shell-shocked “watch parties.” Full freak-out mode was achieved by the 20-minute mark.

Biden’s voice kept trailing off, and he kept getting lost in his train of thought. Donald Trump was sneering and lying. He said a bunch of stuff that made no sense—about club championships, cognitive tests, the whole farce of it. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered in this debate was Biden: his hushed and halting voice. His befuddled resting face. He looked like he wanted to be in bed. Or maybe every Democrat in America was just projecting. People kept sending me vomit emojis, among other things.

Aides soon leaked that the president had a cold. Whatever. He hasn’t looked this bad in public for years. It was painful to watch, and it’s not getting better. The whispers were polite, deferential for a while. Eighty-one? Really? Is he up to this?

Clearly not. Biden needs to step aside, for the sake of his own dignity, for the good of his party, for the future of the country . This debacle of a debate was a low point. It needs to be a turning point.

At least expectations for Biden were extremely low going in. At best, he met those expectations. At worst, well—when I surveyed the social-media chatter at 11:30 p.m., a large majority of people sympathetic to Biden seemed to be taking the under.

“At Least No One Is Accusing Biden of Using Drugs,” read one headline in New York magazine. In Atlanta, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Georgia’s Senator Raphael Warnock were immediately asked in the post-debate “spin room” whether Biden should step aside, as many have already suggested. “Absolutely not,” Newsom said.

“This night was a total disaster for Biden,” tweeted the former Republican congressman and ubiquitous Never Trumper Joe Walsh. “He looked way too old. He looked like he’s no longer capable.” Walsh added that every word out of Trump’s mouth was a lie and he remains a direct threat to democracy, “but Trump won this debate going away.”

Even Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking on CNN, declined to address questions about her boss’s performance except to acknowledge that “it was a slow start.” (In fairness, Trump’s former vice president isn’t even supporting him.)

The best part of this debate for Democrats is that it happened on June 27. There are nearly two months to go until the Democratic Convention in Chicago. If Biden has any sense of how he performed—and hopefully some tough love from those closest to him will make it abundantly clear—he will quit, and soon. It will be a mess to pick a replacement in eight weeks. Harris would have a natural advantage, but the Democrats should throw it open to all comers: Governors Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer, Senators Warnock and Amy Klobuchar, all the usual mentions and some surprises. See what happens in Chicago.

Whatever happens would not be as bad as what happened to Biden last night in Atlanta. Or, for that matter, to the scores of people around the country and globe who have been forced to root for him against the catastrophic alternative. Denial had its place, but it is not a strategy. This is no time for second-guessing or hand-wringing or bed-wetting or dawdling. The Democrats’ problem has never been more apparent. Last night was a bitter way to get the message, but there it was, in full ashen display. If Trump poses the threat to democracy that Democrats insist he does, they need a much better athlete on the stage.

There’s plenty to blame for this imbroglio—beginning with Biden and his hubris, but also the legions of Democrats who refused to say in public what they’ve all been saying in private for months: that they feared Biden was too old for this. Ideally, the process would have started a year ago, or 18 months ago. It would have been nice if one or three of them—other than Representative Dean Phillips —had actually dared to run against him in a primary. (Shout-out to Phillips, by the way, the clear-cut winner of the I-told-you-so primary.)

But again, blame can wait, and the judgment of history will be harsh enough if Trump winds up back in the White House. Right now, though, there’s still time to do something. Time for action.

Never Let Me Go review

Blade runner goes to boarding school….

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It’s an adap of a novel by one of Britain’s best authors (Kazuo Ishiguro), stars some of our hottest young talent and deals with themes of no less importance than the human soul. In other words, Never Let Me Go is a present laid expectantly on Bafta’s doorstep. Let’s hope they kept the receipt. You might expect a sci-fi centred on medical ethics to take place in some future dystopia. But Mark Romanek’s (One Hour Photo) film is set in the drizzle of mid-’90s England, dividing its time between overcast seaside, muddy countryside and a peculiar boarding school called Hailsham. There, pupils Kathy (Carey Mulligan) and Ruth (Keira Knightley) become rivals when Ruth poaches the affections of Tommy (Andrew Garfield). As the three grow into adulthood, they learn that a truly in-love couple might defer the grim fate of Hailsham pupils, and competition for Tommy’s heart intensifies. In another Ishiguro adaptation, The Remains Of The Day, Anthony Hopkins revealed the pathos of a man unable to take action to find happiness in his life. Despite boasting three times the inert characters of that film, Never Let Me Go never achieves equivalent impact. The pupils’ failure to question their fate plays more like lethargy than tragically repressed emotion. Scripter Alex Garland does deserve credit for his restraint; a lesser adap would have ignored the novel’s nuance and put Knightley and Mulligan in silver Lycra. Then again, a better one would’ve found a way to transfer the book’s intense feeling to the screen. Instead, Never Let Me Go is moving only in the sense that it’s depressing and, y’know, so are motorway service stations.

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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

A- : well-written, if not entirely convincing

See our review for fuller assessment.

   Review Consensus :   No consensus, though many are impressed (and even more: confused) by how he goes about it    From the Reviews : "Mr Ishiguro (...) writes such taut, emotionless sentences this time that they feel almost contrived; the language adds much to the book's sense of unreality, but also makes it hard to care much about the characters. (...) The most frustrating aspect of the novel, however, is the paradox of Hailsham's students being so expensively educated and taught to think for themselves, yet so fully accepting of their fate. (...) Thought-provoking stuff, certainly, but ultimately the style outweighs the substance." - The Economist "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, The Guardian "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" - Andrew Barrow, The Independent "The problem for the reviewer, appropriately enough, is that by revealing more of what the book is about he risks going too far and unravelling its meticulously woven fabric of hints and guesses. So I'll leave it there. Suffice it to say that this very weird book is as intricate, subtly unsettling and moving as any Ishiguro has written." - Geoff Dyer, Independent on Sunday "(T)he texture of the writing becomes altogether less interesting, and this may be a reason why the novel seems to be, though only by the standards Ishiguro has set himself, a failure." - Frank Kermode, London Review of Books "Ishiguro�s world can grab no one by the throat, because it is not real. It would have been more effective, for instance, if we learned that all these characters interacting on the page were cows." - Max Watman, The New Criterion "His attention remains fixed on intimate things - on the small social groupings within a school, on the nuances of personal relationships. The larger world remains a distant, blurred backdrop, and is brought into focus only at the end. What holds our attention before then is the way Ishiguro uses the subject of cloning to focus on questions of human existence." - Siddhartha Deb, New Statesman "Like the author's last novel ( When We Were Orphans ), Never Let Me Go is marred by a slapdash, explanatory ending that recalls the stilted, tie-up-all-the loose-ends conclusion of Hitchcock's Psycho . The remainder of the book, however, is a Gothic tour de force that showcases the same gifts that made Mr. Ishiguro's 1989 novel, The Remains of the Day , such a cogent performance." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "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 withcliques, loyalty amd friendship." - Sarah Kerr, The New York Times Book Review "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. (...) 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." - Louis Menand, The New Yorker "(A) powerful and sad narrative. Ishiguro�s -- and Kathy�s -- brave new world is one whose lingering implications we will do well to take to heart." - Stephen Bernstein, Review of Contemporary Fiction "For the meantime, reading Never Let Me Go is like attending the bedside of an organ transplant patient forever on the verge of rejecting. We yearn for the science fiction and romantic aspects of Ishiguro's story to match and thrive. We want desperately for it to work, but somehow, in spite of all that, it never quite takes." - David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle "The result, alas, is a novel quite without vulgarity, but one where the situation is totally implausible on every level. It is an awful thing to say, but I believed so little in any of the people, their situation, or the way they spoke that I didn�t really care what happened to them. They could have been turned into tins of Pedigree Chum without raising much concern. In the past, Ishiguro has been an exceedingly interesting novelist, but he looks increasingly like one at the mercy of his limited linguistic inventiveness." - Philip Hensher, The Spectator "A clear frontrunner to be the year's most extraordinary novel (.....) Graceful and grim, the novel never hardens into anything as clear-cut as allegory but it resonates with disquieting suggestiveness." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times " Never Let Me Go is an intriguing, chilling and ultimately desolate fable. (...) Never Let Me Go will probably disappoint readers for whom the solution of a mystery is all-in-all, or those who want the gratification of full-on horror. But in its evocation of a pervasive menace and despair almost but not quite lost in translation - made up of the shadows of things not said, glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye - the novel is masterly." - Caroline Moore, The Telegraph " Never Let Me Go is a very strange novel. (...) Inevitably, reading Never Let Me Go is not exactly an enjoyable experience. There is no aesthetic thrill to be had from the sentences -- except that of a writer getting the desired dreary effect exactly right. But the novel repays the effort in spades, building to a surprisingly moving climax and echoing around the brain for days afterwards." - Theo Tait, The Telegraph " Never Let Me Go could easily be mistaken for a political novel or a futuristic thriller, but at its dark heart it's an existential fable about people trying to wring some happiness out of life before the lights go out. " - Lev Grossman, Time "This spare approach to description is also one of the most striking qualities of Ishiguro�s prose, and his tendency to cut back -- to foreshorten his characters� horizons -- has become more marked than ever. Here, the austere minimalism of description becomes meaningful. (...) Meaningful though it is, the lack of description in Never Let Me Go is oppressive, and it is questionable whether Ishiguro intends the novel to come across quite so severely as it does." - Tobias Hill, The Times " Never Let Me Go takes the subject of mortality to a vivid extreme. (...) The beauty in this novel must be carefully distinguished from its power to distress. Ultimately, there is a connection: the depth and quality of the relationships between Kath, Tommy and Ruth certainly accentuate the cruelty of their deaths. From under the shadow of their fate, Ishiguro draws warmly compelling vignettes of love and friendship that cumulatively establish an urgent and engrossing narrative pace." - Ruth Scurr, Times Literary Supplement "The death sentence that is Hailsham can for much of the book only be read between the lines, and as in Ishiguro's five previous novels, horror lies in the mundane. (...) A 1984 for the bioengineering age, the novel is a warning and a glimpse into the future whose genius will be recognized as reality catches up." - James Browning, The Village Voice "(Q)uite wonderful (...) the best Ishiguro has written since the sublime The Remains of the Day . It is almost literally a novel about humanity: what constitutes it, what it means, how it can be honored or denied." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

I suppose it was because even at that age -- we were nine or ten -- we knew just enough to make us wary of that whole territory. It's hard now to remember just how much we knew by then. We certainly knew -- though not in any deep sense -- that we were different from our guardians, and also from the normal people outside; we perhaps even knew that a long way down the line there were donations waiting for us. But we didn't really know what that meant. If we were keen to avoid certain topics, it was probably more because it embarrassed us.

None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day. Your lives are set out for you. You'll become adults, then before you're old, before you're even middle-aged, you'll start to donate your vital organs. That's what each of youw as created to do.

About the Author :

       Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan in 1954 and moved to Great Britain when he was five. He won the Booker Prize for his novel The Remains of the Day , has received an OBE, and was named Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2017, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

© 2005-2021 the complete review Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links

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Never Let Me Go: Criticism 1

Here are a links to a review and a couple articles about the novel. All of them have full-book spoilers.

Read through them and see if there are points they articulate well, questions they beg, or if they offer you insights about either the artistry or significance of NLMG. Also I encourage you to search out other reviews and articles, and post on this thread about those. We'll have a second, similar thread March 6, which will be the last scheduled NLMG post.

I also want to encourage everyone to go back, re-read sections at random, and comment on the marginalia thread. It was a little slight for this book -- I think that might partly be because Kathy's voice isn't terribly quotable, and because the passages are rhetorically pregnant and take longer to summarize than they do to quote. Or it might be people are bored of marginalia, but I continue to think it's a practical way to harvest insights from these group reads.

Gray Lady New York Times review contains this sentence:

He works out intricate ways of showing [Kathy's] naïveté, her liabilities as an interpreter of what she sees, but also her deductive smarts, her sensitivity to pain and her need for affection.

What are examples of some of those "intricate ways"?

Practical Model This article in the Guardian is an example of the practical, non-academic discussion I aspire to, and want to see emerge from reddit book subs, like this one. It's clear and makes specific assertions. It doesn't rush to the point of what the book means, instead it's an examination of some items in the novel that set it apart from other novels.

There's a sentence in it I disagree with: "A narrator who has no past beyond herself - no family history - has a special need to recollect." That raises the question how Kathy is different than anyone else -- what is the difference between Kathy and Ruth. But just getting the statement out there raises that interesting question. Is Ruth more imaginative? That bit with the horses suggests so, and the way Ruth can transform herself to be what the Cottagers want in a Hailsham student suggests she has different inner resources than Kathy.

The confines of her diegetic world Quiet Success borrows a terse eloquent characterization of something important in the book: "nonemphatic revelation". It also mentions a number of articles about the work, while arguing that Kathy's narrative is an act of resistance.