Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005
This review has spoilers.
After finishing Ishiguro’s novel, I immediately pounced onto episode two of “The Book Club” podcast hosted by Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett, where they discuss Never Let Me Go as one of their favorite novels. Toward the end of the podcast, it is said that the novel leaves you with a feeling that nothing matters, which compelled me to wonder why I was left with the opposite feeling. Although the book does grapple with endings, loss, and existential fate, it adversely highlights how everything does matter, as all of our actions and objects breed closeness with the world and each other, and that’s humanity. I left the book with a profound feeling of connection to the human experience and human emotion, which Ishiguro fabulizes immaculately in three sections—at Hailsham, a mysterious boarding school, at the Cottages, a sort of university housing complex, and out in the world, when the students are in their careers as carers and donors.
The story follows Kathy, our retrospective, detached, calm first-person narrator, and her two closest friends Ruth and Tommy. Kathy, who is twelve years into her career as a “carer” as opposed to a “donor” (both terms we don’t yet know the meaning of), thinks back on the warmth and nostalgia of her time at Hailsham. The novel is essentially a delivery of retrospect, and it is done with such simpleness and truth, as Kathy is clear about possibly having “some of it wrong” or choosing what to remember and what not. She speaks to the reader sometimes directly, creating an interesting meta-awareness that the account we are to receive is deliberately Kathy’s own. This may be sort of paradoxical to Kathy’s self as a clone (which we will get into), or is directly the point. I am reminded of an aside made in the Book Club podcast, that clones, generally, are never given individual respect, that they are ultimately grouped among each other as something made for the greater good of humanity. I am wondering if Ishiguro had considered this point, and realized the paradoxical nature of Kathy as a narrator, being that it is a deliberately intimate account of her inner world and discoveries.
Of the three parts, Hailsham holds the biggest resonance for me as a reader because the whims of children are maybe the most universal. We don’t yet understand that the actual setting is a holding place for the clones before they are set up to donate their vital organs, so it could very well be a prestigious school for young students of the arts. We don’t know much other than that the students are encouraged to make artistic creations (such as sculptures, objects, or poems, etc.). The best are taken by “Madame,” an intimidating onlooker, for her Gallery. The themes in this first part are very typical of a bildungsroman—Ruth is a sort of leader of a girl clique, and Kathy is very concerned with receiving praise from her; Tommy is teased for his wild temper and outbursts, and Kathy desires to understand him. This triangle of three (Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy) is the story’s thread, as Ruth and Tommy become a couple despite Kathy and Tommy having more of a true camaraderie and kinship.
Madame, along with the “Guardians,” or teachers and watchers (there are no parents), quickly seem to be posed as a fate-rearing force. The kids deal with them very seriously. It is clear they have knowledge that the students don’t have—maybe even sympathy, as shown through Madame who looks on at the students with a sort of wariness, but in one scene inexplicably cries for Kathy who is dancing with a baby doll. It is as if the students are enshroud in one great mystery that the reader doesn’t understand, but the Guardians and Madame do. Ishiguro has paced each scene with such mastery that there is no rush through the scene’s articulation, and we are constantly held in suspense despite small revelations happening in each scene (such as that Madame fears them, or Madame feels for them, or something was said ambiguously, or some emotion has been made conscious).
Another thing Ishiguro does well in the Hailsham chapters (as well as throughout) is invoke the use of the imaginary. The students are prone to playing imaginary games, like riding horses, which is her first memory with Ruth, or telling stories of the horrors in the woods behind the school, or pretending that one of their Guardians will be kidnapped. The biggest imagining may be of Norfolk, a real town, where they seem to all believe is the place that all their lost things go. This is a masterpiece in Ishiguro’s convincing of the clones’ humanity, as they live on the same whims and desires of play that the rest of us do. The idea of the oppressive woods behind Hailsham, and the mystical world of Norfolk, are particularly compelling because they illustrate how the students are stuck in their own four walls, or their own reality, and conceive anything outside of Hailsham as unearthly and magical. In other words, they can’t truly conceive of what it is to be outside of their own, cultivated world.
When they are moved from Hailsham to the Cottages, they fully understand that they are clones, made for the sheer purpose of donating organs. This is something that was always known to them, though since it is their reality, they have never felt the gradual hit of how horrific it is. The Book Club podcast makes a point of how no one even rebels. It is when one of their Guardians, Miss Lucy, overhears some of the students talk about their futures that the students are told, with appropriate urgency, that their lives are already laid out for them and no one will have a future outside of being a carer and donor. The moment for the students is more awkward than it is life-altering. They arrive at the Cottages when they are 18, and it is their last stop before beginning donations.
Where fantasy is a big theme of the first part of Hailsham, this second part is, interestingly, very leant toward a deliberation on sex. I absolutely adore this piece of the novel. It poses sex and love as not only a component of humanity that has no need of being understood, but a sort of biological piece present in everything that lives—especially since at this point of the novel, we do know that the students are clones, and we also know that they are unable to have children. In one very provocative passage (in the Hailsham part, page 83 of my copy), Kathy recounts how talks about the donations sort of coincided with talks about sex and puberty, and that sex had become sort of encouraged. The only thing discouraged was sex with people from the “outside world” when eventually they got there. “Sex affects emotions in ways you’d never expect” according to Miss Emily. Miss Emily’s warning has a chilling quality, as she knows they will die only a few years into adulthood, yet still believes a warning such as this holds weight. At the cottages, it seems that who is having sex with who becomes a sort of center. The students are without individual purpose, so sex then becomes a sort of purpose.
Kathy has a somewhat self-conscious relationship with sex. She feels ashamed and perverted about it. I don’t know how deeply I can express my love for this. How incredibly banal for a girl (though is it fair to call her a “girl,” being that she isn’t a natural human being) to feel ashamed about sex. This is the major tension at the Cottages, yet as we’re reading it, we (and she!) have this horrific knowledge that she was born to donate her organs and die. We are completely invested in her shame and ignorance about the subject of arousal, yet it should be matterless, right? Or is that Ishiguro’s point? That it…isn’t…matterless?
She has casual sex with a lot of the people at the Cottages, and shares with Ruth that sometimes she feels wild about wanting to have sex, like she doesn’t even care who, she just wants to have sex with anyone. There’s this idea floating around—which is sort of like their type of spirituality—that there are people out in the world who they, as clones, are modeled after. These are called the “possibles.” There’s an incredible scene of Kathy sneaking around to look at porn magazines, thinking that her impulse to have sex means she is modeled after a pornstar. Tommy catches her, but it isn’t awkward, and she isn’t embarrassed. This is a great example of how simple and compelling Ishiguro’s scenes are, as it could potentially feel uncomfortable for the reader who knows that sneaking in to look at porn is shameful, though it is a double-edged sword, as it is more sad than it is lascivious, as she is trying to find out something about herself.
In the last part of the novel, Kathy works as a carer for Ruth, then for Tommy after Ruth completes. Before the end of Ruth’s life, she apologizes to Tommy and Kathy for having intentionally kept them apart all these years, knowing they were the better couple. This betrayal is heavier in the dystopian world than it would be for us, as now Kathy and Tommy are together, but Tommy has already finished his second donation, and it is very rare to live through a third and fourth.
This is my one small gripe with the novel—the narrative fully relies on Ruth for having kept Tommy and Kathy apart, but I don’t understand why Tommy would have been with Ruth since childhood if he was in love all this time with Kathy? After Ruth’s completion, Kathy and Tommy begin a relationship. But by nature of Kathy’s reserved, almost “mannered” narration (described this way in the podcast, which I really liked), the love story between Tommy and Kathy never truly comes to a head—the reader believes that they love each other, but there is no heightened scene of intensity or climax between the two.
There is this rumor about how if two people are verifiably in love, Madame will defer their donation for a few years so they can spend time together. The rumor is a devastating plotpoint, as it makes apparent the clones’ awareness of how little time they have on earth. But the idea of being in love, posed as this objective, measurable thing that can be judged by Madame and change the fate of the longevity of your life is a really strange concept—really, it is not very human at all. Love is universally without definition, but the characters seek to claim that it can be proven. The novel intentionally uses love as this major thing which can justify a life being worth continuing—justify changing their purpose. The inclusion of this is my only argument that the clones possibly are not intended to be human.
The story’s “plot twist” is the revelation that not only was there never any chance for deferral, but the Guardians had fought long and hard to prove to the world that the clones have souls at all. This is why their artwork was collected in the Galleries. The confrontation scene is disturbing—it feels very rushed, and even loud and chaotic, because as Miss Emily explains to Kathy and Tommy that they had not even a single chance, the conversation is cut short when construction workers appear to work on her cabinets. It is shocking; we feel as the domestic sphere becomes repulsive. And, on a larger scale, it is as if while Miss Emily is explaining that the lives of the clones have no meaning, she is claiming her own does have meaning—meaning enough that even her cabinetry is of higher import. This too is somewhat paradoxical, as Miss Emily spent her life fighting for the humanization of the clones, but since she lost the battle (Hailsham was eventually shut down), it no longer matters to her, but other things, such as her cabinetry, do.
Tommy has a bit of an outburst on the drive home, and they are, beautifully, stuck in mud, holding strong to one another while the forces of nature are roaring around them. For the rest of the car ride back to the donation center, they don’t really mention the outcome of their deferral request. They are easily back in the reality they’ve always known.
Before Tommy and Kathy part, when he soon decides he no longer wants her to be his carer because he doesn’t want her to watch him die, he tells her of back in Hailsham when he would score a goal in football, he would pretend he was running through water. Again, it is these fantasies, and these hopes, which really paint these “creatures” (as Madame calls them) as human.
In the most intimate last paragraph, Kathy “indulges” by going to Norfolk, where they used to believe all the lost things went, and imagining Tommy would be there, running toward her.
I believe Ishiguro’s point is that this is the crux of life. We live, are educated in art and literature so we feel there is purpose, and then are thrown on some fate and die, sometimes early, sometimes late. Really the lesson of the fable is that the clones are not much different from ourselves, and although the world can argue that nothing matters in the end (the pessimists, the nihilists), Ishiguro argues that love and sex and art and connection really, really do.
Full 5/5 or 6/5. Truly mindbreaking and lifechanging.
