A Book Review
“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro
A melancholic coming-of-age tale
Imagine being raised in a boarding school where the goal is not to produce educated citizens who will go on to explore the variety of life, but to prepare youngsters designed for a specific and limited purpose. Set in late 20th century Britain, where science has found the answer to life-threatening diseases, this “quasi-science fiction” and strange coming-of-age is the story of the novel Never Let Me Go.
The book explores the lives of three friends, Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth who live in Hailsham House boarding school. Their lives and those of other students around them are curious. The kids are orphans, but they never wonder about their parents. They can never have kids. They have to stay healthy and there are frequent medical check-ups. Smoking is told to be especially harmful for these kids. Hailsham students are never told enough about the world outside. The teachers, known as guardians, keep a close watch on what the students are allowed to know and what they consume. Although reading is encouraged, pages on which there are instances of smoking or anything related to it are ripped out from the books.
Structurally, the novel is distributed across three parts. It is narrated by Kathy who has been a carer for organ donors for about twelve years. She takes an innocent, often childish voice when recalling her life and her friends back at Hailsham. She remembers the different guardians, the empathetic Miss Lucy who breaks the rules of the school by telling the students what they are not supposed to know.
Kathy narrates her ever-changing relationship with her friends, Tommy and Ruth, and their life at the cottages after Hailsham where they live with other young adults.
The third part is about Kathy’s life as a carer and that of her friends as donors.
Readers learn that students at Hailsham are cloned from humans. However, there doesn’t seem to be anything atypical to the kids that makes them any less human. If we didn’t know that the kids were clones, there would be no way of telling them apart from the real humans. This makes the novel all the more haunting because one develops such an affinity for Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth that it’s upsetting when they can’t have a normal life like other humans. Since their life has been written for them, doing anything else seems virtually impossible. It doesn’t even occur to the kids to ever run away when they become adults. For this reason, a sense of hopelessness and dread permeates throughout the book. In knowing that one’s life is short and preordained for a specific purpose, there is little to no hope in expecting anything else.
Thematically, questions about morality can be raised about the system of cloning children from real humans, raising them in a boarding school and eventually prepping them for organ donations. There doesn’t seem to be any discussion about this at all in the book. Has the government allowed this through a democratic system? Is it kept a secret from the general population? Is the system being replicated around the world or is it only taking place in Britain? Such important questions are left unanswered.
The question of morality can also be linked to a question about the existence of religion in the book. But Ishiguro has almost completely eradicated religion from his novel. There isn’t a single allusion to the traditional god in the whole book despite the presence of a religious symbol such as the old church at Hailsham. However, it is clear that the god in Never Let Me Go are the people who are playing god themselves by creating clones of humans and giving them a pre-ordained purpose. This shows Ishiguro’s deep insight that versions of god differ across societies and the absence of one kind of god does not mean that god doesn’t exist at all.
Depressingly beautiful and hauntingly opaque, ‘Never Let Me Go’ reminds readers that in this short life, we must never let our friends go, especially if they are the only ones with whom we ever really connected.
Perhaps the most interesting part about being at Hailsham is that creativity and self-expression are strongly encouraged in the form of artwork and essays. Every year, students are supposed to submit their drawings to the mysterious gallery of Madame. For the students, the gallery is where the best artwork goes, so they paint as well as they can. Tommy develops a theory that the gallery is there to gaze into the souls of the students and to check whether two people are in love so that they can get a deferral on their donations and be able to spend more time with each other.
This theory turns out to be the final chance for love towards the end of the novel.
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