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NEVER LET ME GO

by Kazuo Ishiguro ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2005

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

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

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

Pub Date: April 11, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005

LITERARY FICTION

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by Kazuo Ishiguro ; illustrated by Bianca Bagnarelli

by Kazuo Ishiguro

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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

ABSOLUTE POWER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 18, 1996

The mother of all presidential cover-ups is the centerpiece gimmick in this far-fetched thriller from first-novelist Baldacci, a Washington-based attorney. In the dead of night, while burgling an exurban Virginia mansion, career criminal Luther Whitney is forced to conceal himself in a walk-in closet when Christine Sullivan, the lady of the house, arrives in the bedroom he's ransacking with none other than Alan Richmond, President of the US. Through the one-way mirror, Luther watches the drunken couple engage in a bout of rough sex that gets out of hand, ending only when two Secret Service men respond to the Chief Executive's cries of distress and gun down the letter-opener-wielding Christy. Gloria Russell, Richmond's vaultingly ambitious chief of staff, orders the scene rigged to look like a break-in and departs with the still befuddled President, leaving Christy's corpse to be discovered at another time. Luther makes tracks as well, though not before being spotted on the run by agents from the bodyguard detail. Aware that he's shortened his life expectancy, Luther retains trusted friend Jack Graham, a former public defender, but doesn't tell him the whole story. When Luther's slain before he can be arraigned for Christy's murder, Jack concludes he's the designated fall guy in a major scandal. Meanwhile, little Gloria (together with two Secret Service shooters) hopes to erase all tracks that might lead to the White House. But the late Luther seems to have outsmarted her in advance with recurrent demands for hush money. The body count rises as Gloria's attack dogs and Jack search for the evidence cunning Luther's left to incriminate not only a venal Alan Richmond but his homicidal deputies. The not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper climax provides an unsurprising answer to the question of whether a US president can get away with murder. For all its arresting premise, an overblown and tedious tale of capital sins. (Film rights to Castle Rock; Book-of-the-Month selection)

Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1996

ISBN: 0-446-51996-0

Page Count: 480

Publisher: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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Never Let Me Go: Book Review

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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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Never Let Me Go

By kazuo ishiguro.

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

Article written by Emma Baldwin

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

The novel is a challenging read, not so much for the style of writing it contains but due to the ethical and moral issues it presents and the truly emotional narrative that plays out within the text. Readers are more than likely going to find themselves getting attached to Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth and struggling to comprehend the world they’re growing up in. 

Character Analysis 

The central character in ‘Never Let Me Go’ is Kathy. She’s the narrator of the novel and the person whose perspective tints everything one learns about the world. She spends the novel trying to understand her youth and make sense of the role she’s playing now and will play in the future. 

She delivers a narrative that’s simple but filled with feelings of nostalgia and melancholy. She is an introspective person and this bleeds into Ishiguro’s depiction of her through her narrative. This is particularly effective when she speaks about her role as a carer later in the novel. She has a deep understanding of human emotions and an ability to connect to people — two things that those who implemented the clone program would prefer not to acknowledge about her and all those like her. 

Other characters seen in the novel are depicted through Kathy’s understanding of them. These include her two closest friends, Tommy and Ruth. Tommy is someone who evolves throughout the novel. At times, he’s temperamental and vulnerable (particularly as it concerns his art, which he’s teased about). He and Kathy always care for one another, but it’s not too late in the book that the extent of their feelings is revealed. 

Ruth is another complicated character who, it could be argued, is the hardest to understand in the book. She has a profound sense of insecurity and a deep desire for acceptance and normalcy. She tries to accomplish this by demonstrating her knowledge about the clones’ situation but is often incorrect or makes assumptions she can’t back up. 

Ishiguro’s Style and Writing Techniques 

Ishiguro is known for his understated writing style. His prose is often deceptively simple and devoid of the lyrical flourishes seen in other writers’ work. Kathy’s narrative voice is calm and level throughout the novel, but she is not without more reflective and introspective moments. 

This creates a subdued and intimate tone, allowing readers to connect to the various characters in a meaningful way. Much of the novel plays out through memories, as well. This means that there are times in which nostalgia influences the events being described and moments in which readers may not be able to trust Kathy’s depiction of events. 

She proves herself to be an unreliable narrator in certain points of the book, but this is something that makes the story all the more compelling. Readers are left in the dark about certain issues and allowed to understand them at the same time that the characters do. The narration and Ishiguro’s overall style often leave elements ambiguous and open to interpretation. This allows readers to engage with the text and form their own opinions of the story and its themes. 

Philosophical Content 

One of the more memorable elements of the novel is how the characters’ personal lives create commentary on the plot’s moral and ethical issues. The entire book is centered around the issue of cloning and how, in a worst-case-scenario, these clones could be used. 

The clones are utilized for organ harvesting against their will and are created for this sole purpose. This leads to a broader discussion on the ethics of sacrificing a few for the greater good and the dehumanization that can come with scientific advancements. 

The novel forces readers to consider what they would feel if they were in the clones’ position or what their stance on the entire issue of cloning is. Ishiguro also explores the topic of free will throughout the novel. He asks whether true agency is even possible under the constrained circumstances the clones grow up in. Readers are also likely going to be inspired to consider what the characters’ acceptance of their fate means. Is it complicity or purely a coping mechanism? 

Never Let Me Go: Ishiguro's Commentary on Cloning

Book Title: Never Let Me Go

Book Description: 'Never Let Me Go' challenges readers to comprehend a world in which cloning is legal and utilized for the sole purpose of creating a source of viable organs.

Book Author: Kazuo Ishiguro

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: Knopf

Date published: September 5, 2005

ISBN: 978-0-375-40251-0

Number Of Pages: 288

• Lasting Effect on Reader

Never Let Me Go Review

‘Never Let Me Go’ is a stunning and highly memorable book that’s certainly one of the best novels of the early 20th century. It focuses on a dystopian future in which clones are created for the single purpose of organ harvesting.

• Incredibly memorable story
• Beautiful prose
• Deeply relevant
• Likely to leave readers with questions
• Frustrating characters

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About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Exploring Humanity's Darkest Ethical Boundaries

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Genre:  Dystopian Science Fiction
• First Publication: 2005
• Language:  English
• Setting: Hailsham (United Kingdom), England, United Kingdom
• Characters: Kathy H., Ruth, Tommy D.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” is a quiet masterpiece that will burrow under your skin and stay there long after the final page. On its surface, it presents as a melancholic coming-of-age tale following a trio of friends—Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy—as they progress from idyllic school days at the eerily insular Hailsham boarding academy into the harsh awakenings of adulthood. But this haunting novel is so much more than just your standard nostalgic reverie. With deceptively simple prose masking profound explorations of humanity, mortality, and society’s ethics when confronted with scientific innovation’s darker potentials, Ishiguro has crafted a supremely affecting meditation on what it means to lead a life of worth and dignity.

The narrative unfolds as a series of introspective recollections from Kathy, now an “adult carer” in her thirties, who reflects back on her Hailsham upbringing and the gradual disintegration of her lifelong friendships with Ruth and Tommy over the years. As these reminiscences accumulate, a distinctly unsettling and poignant subtext begins to take form implicating the school’s peculiar purpose in raising these “special” students.

While Ishiguro is masterfully economical in parceling out the full revelations of Hailsham’s raison d’être and the larger societal framework these youths have been groomed into, hints of their sinister conditioning steadily accrue atmospheric tension. From the sporadic supervising “guardians” to the disturbing “donations” they’re all primed for, an intricate mystery gathers that profoundly alters how we interpret the wistful surface-level nostalgia infusing Kathy’s recollections.

What emerges is a slowly unfolding thought experiment probing disquieting philosophical questions about scientific ethics, authoritarian control, and human dignity’s boundaries in the face of technological overreach. The understated precision in how Ishiguro marries domestic coming-of-age storytelling with grander provocations around mortality and identity is utterly transfixing.

Main Character Analysis:

In Kathy, Ishiguro has crafted one of modern literature’s most disarmingly empathetic and authentic first-person perspectives. The naturalistic simplicity and almost naïve relatability of her reminiscences on the pleasures and pains of schoolyard friendships and burgeoning first love instantly endear us to her interiority. We see the inseparable bonds forged with Ruth and Tommy through tiny observational details only known to the closest of friends.

Yet Ishiguro injects undercurrents of melancholy and muted acceptance laced through even Kathy’s warmest reveries – emotional textures that steadily coalesce into rich layers of subtext hinting at her deeper reservoirs of heartbreak, self-deception, and inner resilience. She emerges as both an empathetic person and piercingly nuanced conveyor of universal human longings for love, meaning, and transcendence in the face of suffering.

Crucially, the author invests Kathy with such authenticity and understated grace that even as the story’s sinister dystopian dimensions crystallize, she never becomes a symbolic vehicle for easy moralizing or philosophical posturing. Her wistful tone and contradictions mirror our own all-too-human struggles with harsh truths while her dignity and small assertions of selfhood in the face of systemic dehumanization radiate quiet, inextinguishable power.

Writing Style:

From the opening pages, Ishiguro casts an inescapable melancholic spell with his sparse, unsentimental yet immensely rich prose style. The spareness and emotional restraint of his narration perfectly captures Kathy’s self-effacing wistfulness while belying vast internal oceans of unspoken alienation and grief roiling beneath his characters’ serene facades.

He sequences each mundane reminiscence or character interaction with such exquisite deliberateness and granular specificity that every detail becomes imbued with chilling symbolic resonance by his story’s end. An unassuming mastery that hauntingly unspools beneath you with each meditative passage, making the ultimate revelations and silences hit like sledgehammers to the soul.

Beneath the meditative surface-level reveries and coming-of-age trappings, “Never Let Me Go” ultimately congeals into a richly provocative philosophical rumination on humanity’s ethics concerning scientific innovation and advancement at any moral or existential cost. Kathy, Ruth, Tommy, and their fellow Hailsham students personify the full spectrum of human dignity discarded when society privileges institutional control and technological progress over the sanctity of life itself.

Ishiguro embeds subversive threads questioning the norms by which we categorize personhood, individuality, and even the souls we may be condemning to effective living death through collective complacency. The sinister subtext of these special children being groomed into organ donor farms touches existential nerves over the value we assign undesirable social classes and how easily systematic dehumanization can take root through bureaucratic efficiencies.

Yet the author roots these heady critiques with palpable emotional stakes in the intimate humanity and soul anguish we witness these constrained characters enduring. Their tragedy lies not just in their fates but the resilience and beauty they summon in asserting identity beyond society’s merciless scripts for them. Ishiguro beckons reckoning with technology’s spiritual void if divorced from our core ethics.

What People Are Saying:

Since its release, “Never Let Me Go” has cemented Ishiguro’s status as one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary fiction authors. Lavished with praise for its restrained poignancy, rich themes around mortality and human worth, and disquieting social allegory, it has emerged a true modern masterwork.

While occasionally faulted for tonal unevenness or characters that can feel like mere thematic apparatuses, most reviewers agree Ishiguro has produced a quiet yet profound triumph. One that lingers in the conscience long after its ostensibly unassuming narrative ends with a visceral cathartic impact few other novels can match.

My Personal Take:

I vividly remember powering through “Never Let Me Go” during a lonely bout of insomnia one sleepless night when I was deep in the throes of a depressive spiral stemming from my own suppressed childhood traumas. As someone who’d been drawn to Ishiguro’s reserved yet soulful body of work precisely for how his narratives seemed to distill universal aches about existential longing, transience, and what leaves an enduring human mark on the world, I wasn’t prepared for how utterly this particular novel would emotionally dismantle me.

From the opening passages detailing Kathy’s tender recollections of her earliest days at Hailsham’s idyllic campus, there was something about the poetic sparseness and underlying elegiac hues suffusing Ishiguro’s immaculate yet humble prose style that just hooked itself directly into my melancholic psychological wavelengths. But then, as subtle revelations about the sinister shadows looming over these cherished adolescent memories and the sterile institutional environment Kathy had normalized began accruing disquieting resonance, I felt the thematic floodgates opening as the story progressed.

Few authors have ever channeled the sheer emotional devastation of having one’s fundamental human worth and individuality systemically invalidated and stripped away by dehumanizing societal constructs as staggeringly as Ishiguro does here. As I found myself drowning in complex swirls of anger, existential dread, and ultimately overwhelming empathy for the quiet graces Kathy still summons in clinging to each cherished memory and reclaiming identity, I was utterly transfixed. Each wistful recollection, every darkly amusing bit of friends’ banter, every stifled eruption of cataclysmic heartbreak suddenly congealed into this profoundly piercingly vision for me about the stifling inheritances of codified societal dehumanization that still paralyze us all in different ways.

Even days after finishing the final pages, that hollowed yet cathartic sensation of an old emotional blockage being unearthed stayed lodged in my psyche. Ishiguro had gently but powerfully prodded me into confronting my own buried wounds in the most sublime way – not through overt melodrama, but by tenderly dignifying the souls and small gestures of transcendent selfhood Kathy and Ruth and Tommy fought to preserve no matter what indignities society attempted to strip from them. A shattering reminder that beauty, meaning, and identity’s essential urgencies can never be invalidated if we bravely assert them.

Wrapping It Up:

Quiet but with reverberations that will leave you forever changed, Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” emerges as a subtly astonishing literary landmark. What initially presents as a mournful coming-of-age romance steadily morphs into one of the most searing philosophical provocations around scientific ethics, systemic dehumanization, and what makes a life of real consequence when all dignity has been stripped away.

Yet for all its heady allegorical potency, this novel cuts deepest through Ishiguro’s supreme emotional acuity and gift for rendering the small human moments of grace and identity-assertion as both cathartic salve and eternal reminder of our individual resilience’s boundless urgency. A quiet masterwork that will linger for lifetimes.

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Sealed in a World That's Not as It Seems

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By Michiko Kakutani

• April 4, 2005

'Never Let Me Go' By Kazuo Ishiguro 288 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.

The teenagers in Kazuo Ishiguro's bravura new novel seem, at first meeting, like any other group of privileged boarding school students. They are constantly joining and abandoning rival cliques. They support and snipe at one another with petty rage and bantering good humor. They play sports, take art classes and obsess endlessly about sex. Their school, Hailsham, is a hermetic world unto itself -- a prettily groomed English Arcadia that boasts a cool sports pavilion, spacious playing fields, a picturesque pond and winding bucolic paths. Their teachers keep telling them that they are "special," that they have an important role to play in later life.

Hidden at the heart of Hailsham, however, is a horrible, dark secret -- a secret that the reader only gradually grasps.

As in so many of Mr. Ishiguro's novels, there is no conventional plot here. Instead, a narrator's elliptical reminiscences provide carefully orchestrated clues that the reader must slowly piece together, like a detective, to get a picture of what really happened and why.

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.

This time, Mr. Ishiguro's art of withholding -- his pared-down, Pintereque prose, his masterful narrative control, his virtuosic use of understatement and elision -- is put in the service of a far-out science fiction plot involving clones and organ transplants. The result, amazingly enough, is not the lurid thriller the subject matter might suggest. Rather, it's an oblique and elegiac meditation on mortality and lost innocence: a portrait of adolescence as that hinge moment in life when self-knowledge brings intimations of one's destiny, when the shedding of childhood dreams can lead to disillusionment, rebellion, newfound resolve or an ambivalent acceptance of a preordained fate.

The truth of what is going at Hailsham dawns on the reader slowly. At first, the only thing odd about the reminiscences of the narrator, Kathy, is her use of certain words: she tells us that she has worked as a "carer" for 11 years now, that her "donors" have "always tended to do much better than expected." We learn that Kathy was recently a carer for Ruth, one of her old friends from Hailsham, and that Ruth was staying at a "recovery center" in Dover.

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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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Reviews of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

Never Let Me Go

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• First Published:
• Apr 1, 2005, 320 pages
• Mar 2006, 304 pages

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

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

Excerpt Never Let Me Go

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

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

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Beyond the Book

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

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