Book: Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
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In one of the most memorable novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now 31, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.


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While I really liked The Remains of the Day, I'm a bit undecided about this book. The entire concept of the book is much like The Remains of the Day - it's about the past, what's lost, and a kind of hollowness that's not exactly that devastating kind of sad but still sad all the same.

Some spoilers abound. (I'm basically revealing the whole mystery, so this is pure spoilery stuff)

As I first read the book I was a bit confused but their being sheltered and their names - no full names at all. Main character Kathy talks about being a "carer" for 12 years and soon having to be a "donor". The school, Hailsham, first sounded like a boarding school, but then I start to notice there's no "family" involved, and that the teachers are "guardians". And then there was all that talk about artworks, and big secrecy stuff. At that time I started to suspect the eventual dystopianess of it. It was at the point where Tommy hurt his elbow and then Kathy was explaining how when some other student would do something gross (I do not recall, horde all the food I think?) then they would all "unzip a liver" and throw it around? And that somewhere Kathy had revealed that it was "okay to have sex because they can't have babies anyway" ... I had my first suspicions about them being "test" children by then.

Later around the middle of the book, Ruth says it out loud that they are really "clones" of people, so that sort of closed this one question that was bugging me.

So apparently, they get their education, then are sent off to the world. They would go into training to be a "carer", someone who would take care of the "donors". It wasn't explicitly explained, but I got the impression that everyone would start as a "carer" and then eventually become a "donor", but it is never explicit what they are actually "donating". At then end, I guess when their bodies fail (done enough of "donating" I guess?) they "complete" (die, I suppose).

What I've read on reviews about the book, that Kathy, Tommy and Ruth having a strange relationship didn't really come to me. I thought it pretty normal - Friend with bully-tendencies (Ruth) knew all along friends Kathy and Tommy had a thing for each other but decides to get in between them and drive them apart. When something serious comes up (Ruth's impending "completion"), then she apologizes and urges them to "get together" and "try for a deferment".

Kathy and Tommy trying to get that "deferment" was the whole unveiling of the full mystery, which by then was pretty anti-climatic.

In the end, Tommy "completes" as well, and soon Kathy would embark her life as a "donor", and the book ends there, with Kathy imagining that she would see Tommy again while on a field in Norfolk (some inside "joke" that was laid out in the beginning of the book - "all lost things end up in Norfolk", and Kathy had just lost Tommy).

I kind of get the whole emotional direction this book wanted to go (much the same as The Remains of The Day) but the whole dystopian setting kind of makes it all weird. I'm not sure how accurate these test tube babies thing is (assuming it's all fictional) so... at the end of the day, I get the feeling that this is just the same book as The Remains of The Day, repackaged.

Despite that, the mysterious premise was what egged me to read on. "I don't understand it! One more page and it should clear things up!" was a constant thought when I read past curfew or wanted to just go do something else.