Reviewing Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (September 2023)

This book, first published in 2005, was introduced to me as science fiction, a genre that I've only really become interested in my later years. I was looking for a new author. Having only recently read a number of Liu Cixin's recently translated science fiction, my expectations were pretty high. It didn't have to be hard sci-fi. In fact a short story by Ursula Le Guin, 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas' was just about right. But I wanted something a bit longer, and after some searching stumbled onto Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. I was intrigued by this brief description in Esquire:

[T]his literary masterpiece seamlessly blends tones and genres to superb effect. Blending Gothic romance, sci-fi dystopia, and coming-of-age novel, Never Let Me Go finds a cloistered group of boarding school students questioning not only their purpose, but their very existence. These students are conditioned from a young age to fulfill a very special destiny, a function so bleak and shocking the reader can’t help but recoil in despair.

That was enough to get me started in the novel, and once there, I found it unputdownable.

As it turned out, Le Guin's short story had set the stage for this type of sci-fi novel. In 'Omelas,' Le Guin reworks an idea she attributes to William James, the American philosopher, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian novelist. The gist of her story is captured in her synopsis which appears near the end of the story:

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

Never Let Me Go works out the details of a similar theme. The novel is the journal of Kathy H., a carer in her 12th year of service—an unusually long commitment. The journal covers Kathy's residence at Hailsham, a sort of boarding school for students. Hailsham—its buildings, grounds and people—were their entire world. There is no mention of family or friends outside the grounds of Hailsham. The students are called that, but they are very 'special' students as their guardians (teachers) tell them over and over.

Beyond the events and people of Hailsham, the journal records Kathy's work as a carer—a position for which she and her fellows have been prepared—a palliative caregiver for those recovering from organ donations all of whom are former 'students' like herself. Her journal is for others who will follow—so that they will understand, too.

As the narrator, Kathy is the one we rely on for a true and faithful account, and she makes a real effort to sort through her past and "order all these old memories" and "get straight all the things that happened." (Some of the extended quotes, notably in Chapter 22, should perhaps be thought of as reconstructed paraphrases.) Nevertheless, she herself acknowledges her own occasional misinterpretations of events and mischaracterization of people and is careful to correct her mistaken assessments—years later sometimes—after receiving a fuller picture from others involved. One pivotal event whose significance she only comes to understand late in the novel is the time when she is slow dancing, a pillow held close to her breast, to her 'song,' 'Never Let Me Go', and catches Madame, one of the guardians, crying as she looks in and listens through the partially opened door. It is in Chapter 22 that many of the questions deferred from earlier on are answered, and they are answered at length by two of the principal Hailsham guardians, Miss Emily, a kind of head mistress, and Madame, the taciturn French or Belgian woman in the grey suit, known to students as the one who periodically visits Hailsham to collect the students' best artwork—creative work that affirms the 'soul.'

Without giving away too much, the reader finally learns the secrets that Kathy herself learns—what it is that makes the students 'special' and what makes Hailsham, in particular, very special and how the students and Hailsham, respectively, are connected to the world outside. The reader will have been sensing something unexplained, and always just below the surface, in what appears to be an ordinary English boarding school experience. It is the reader's page-turning to get underneath the simple storyline that gradually at first and then all of sudden exposes the ominous truth—perhaps too abruptly and completely as if Ishiguro was in a rush to tie things up and conclude the novel.

There are a couple of important themes the reader might want to bear in mind while reading the novel. The theme of segregation is perhaps the most obvious. Why are the students so completely segregated? And how do they cope with the fact that they are 'in isolation?' How does segregation reflect a larger world of hierarchies of human value? How is superiority communicated in such a hierarchical world?

A second important theme is that of one's mission or purpose, and the Hailsham guardians and the carers give us two very different examples of the 'causes' that people take up and the reasons why. Here, there is room for the reader to debate the big questions of existence, one of the most important being 'is any of this worthwhile?' Alternatively, is a 'cause' not a way to escape the punishment—so well described in Dante's antechamber to Hell—reserved for those who chose to live a passive acquiescent life?

This brief review has tried to avoid spoiling the plot and the story, and hopefully readers will find out for themselves the answers that develop throughout the journal.

Ishiguro writes with great lucidity and, in this reviewer's opinion, he successfully captures the voice of Kathy—it being no mean feat adopting the perspective of another ... and across gender lines. The principal characters, especially the three friends—Kathy, Ruth and Tom—are substantial and well developed over the course of Kathy's journal, and Ishiguro's employment of use of the flashbacks and deferrals one would expect to find in a journal is managed to great effect so that the reader never loses the narrative thread, and the suspense is allowed to continue to build. This is not stream of consciousness writing inaccessible to a privileged few. It is also definitely science fiction with very sobering insights about what it means to be human, and it does so with extraordinary empathy.