Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]
I went into this year with a New Year’s reading resolution: I was going to make it a point to primarily read fiction from the last decade. I started out by reading Susan Gregg Gilmore’s Looking For Salvation At The Dairy Queen, which is a book I would recommend for summer reading. The narrator’s voice is good, it is light and breezy, and reads like a book that would make for a good movie if put in the hands of a caring director and producers who are faithful to the tone of the book. (So why didn’t I write a review of this book here? I never found the time to do so. It’s a bad excuse, I know, but it’s the truth too.) I then proceeded to tackle The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which was the previous book to be reviewed here. Next up on the fiction-of-the-’00′s theme is Never Let Me Go, the unsuspecting (and almost disguised) sci-fi novel from Kazuo Ishiguro published in 2005.
[Before I get into the meat of my criticism of this book, let me just say that this book is written in first-person narrative, and that, for me, first-person narrative is a tricky proposition because it becomes that much harder for me to warm up to the narrator. Personally, I think it is harder to love a first-person narrator, and, conversely, it is easier to love a third-person narrator. First-person by default allows for certain traps to be uncovered easily; a third-person narrative can conceal almost everything and still be engrossing. Again, these are just my opinions and tastes regarding the two styles.]
Never Let Me Go is written in first-person by Kathy, a carer who went to a school called Hailsham in Britain. From the sound of it early on Hailsham seems akin to an Ivy League school: its prestige can also create an image of elitism to people who are not alumni. Hailsham’s main purpose as a school seems to be its ability to churn out carers—a kind of nurse that comforts and takes care of people who donate organs and body parts.
The first half of the book revolves around Kathy and her friends, Ruth and Tommy, at Hailsham; the second half revolving mostly around the three of them at a post-Hailsham place called The Cottages. The second half of the book is also where the book’s central story unfolds itself in earnest: you find out that the students of Hailsham are actually clones, essentially created to be organ donors for human beings later on down the line. Additionally, you find out that Hailsham was established with the goal of showing society that the clones—the students—had true human qualities and something akin to a soul. All throughout their time at Hailsham, a couple of times a year an older woman simply named Madame would come to the school and take art that the students had produced. None of them ever knew why she did it or what it meant. It turns out that the art was taken and brought to exhibitions as a means of proving that the clones had a sense of curiosity, creativity, and artfulness.
On the whole Never Let Me Go is written very well but I found the overall story to simply be kind of uninteresting. I felt as though I got to know Kathy pretty well—the first-person narration here is strong, which is a good thing—but I never found her story to be enthralling. I will, however, concede that two parts of the book were quite brilliant:
1) the idea that the clones seem to inherently believe that their human counterparts are hookers, strippers, and drug dealers. Once they move to the Cottages Kathy begins to dabble in casual sex, which isn’t terribly unusual especially if you think of the Cottages as a metaphor for college. Except that whenever Kathy has sex she feels a palpable desire to have sex right now, almost like a low-level, abstract nymphomania, which causes her to believe temporarily that she must have been copied from a prostitute and that this sexual desire is residual from the cloning process. I thought that this was a great metaphor for a particular type of confusion that afflicts most everyone as young adults: a confusion born of sexual freedom that makes you question why you are having sex with the people that you are. It is also a confusion that seems very female-centric, as casual hookups seem to cause women to question themselves more than men do.
2) the part about the porn magazines at the Cottages. Midway through the book there is a brief passage about a former student named Steve and the only thing anyone remembered or knew about him was that he had a soft-core pornography collection. Subsequently, any time a porn magazine was discovered, everyone would a) say something to the effect of “here’s another of Steve’s magazines” and b) pretend to be bored and annoyed by their presence. And, yet, no one ever threw them out and whenever someone found one of them they would disappear for about 30 minutes. Of all the many ways it could have been written that the clones and humans were linked together behaviorally I kind of love that Ishiguro decided to write that the clones were just as naturally susceptible as we humans are to playing weird social roles amongst friends and strangers (as opposed to safe things like “they both can feel pain” or “they both yearn to fall in love”).
All in all, though, Never Let Me Go just didn’t do it for me. If you really like first-person narratives and English writing and low-level sci-fi you may like it a lot more than I did. I found the story to be kind of dull and therefore would not recommend it to anyone looking for some general reading to submerse themselves in.
