Never Let Me Go – Review

I have just finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

A great read, touching, thoughtful, shocking, heartbreaking even. Not necessarily one you will want to go back to, but surely one you won’t forget. Not easy on the mind and conscience. I’m not sure, how much one should know about it in the beginning, so I’ll go on in spoiler tags. But I really think you should pick up and read this.

SPOILER ALERT!

Never Let Me Go tells the story of Kathy H. and her two friends Ruth and Tommy, growing up at Hailsham, a mixture between children’s home and public school. Kathy H. tells it as a 30-something adult living in 90′s UK in retrospect.

Hailsham at first looks innocuous enough, but there are a number of strange things too. The teachers are ‘guardians’, there is never talk about families, not even second names are mentioned, there is an ‘outside’ that is never explored by the students, there is no tv, but apparently there are videoplayers and tapes, there’s no teenager stuff like gossip about actors, music and so on. There are no weekends or holidays spent at home, no siblings and generally, no other background than Hailsham.

The kids at Hailsham are told that they are ‘special’, that they have a specific purpose, and an enormous effort is made to educate them, spur their creativity in every direction, painting, poetry, needlework, even stage plays are hinted at, giving at first glance the impression of an exclusive boarding school. Yet, there are also a number of curious gaps in that childhood. Keeping healthy and in good overall condition is imperative at Hailsham, and diseases are not an item there. The only connection to ‘outside’ is a lorry full of an obscure assortment of goods the children can buy with Hailsham’s own currency. The students own works of art, paintings and so on encouraged so much, are shown at regular exhibitions and the kids buy each others works, whereas the best examples are going into the ‘gallery’ of Madame, a woman irregularly visiting the premises.

Gradually it is hinted at that the studens, all of them, are to become ‘donors’ in the future, and by then the reader already suspects what this means. But when it’s finally vocalised by one of the guardians that all the kids are just clones, merely bred to become a living resource for vital organs, what’s really shocking is not the monstrosity of this simple truth, but the complete ignorance of the implications and absence of any opposition the students show. What they are disturbed about is not their nature as a different form of kettle, but the fact that ‘they’ (meaning in this context ordinary people, embodied in the character of Madame) seem to be utterly afraid and revolted by them.

The Hailsham students also seem to have gotten little to no education in the field one could in a wider context call ‘religion and moral philosophy’. They are merely taught to accept their fate and even to assist in it, becoming after a certain time ‘carers’, which means driving across the country, visiting ‘donors’, talking to them, encouraging them, help them keep on pushing. Until it’s their own time to become a ‘donor’, a perspective met by most with hardly a blink. Apart from that, there is no real purpose for them in life.

But it’s shown that the students develop their own form of myths, their own search for a sense in life. One of these myths is the rumour that a couple, if they really love each other, can get a deferral, for a time. And Kathy and Tommy set out to find out about this. Unintentionally, they meet by accident their… what? parent? no… God? no… But then again, in a way, they do. And what they learn is even more of a shock than the story up to then.

Never Let Me Go is in many ways a fascinating read, but it also has an awful message, and the moment the story gets even worse is, as far as I remember, the only scene when Ishiguro actually mentions a current brand name. For the simple purpose to prevent readers from dismissing the world of the story as not being ours. It is different, but it’s also much closer to ours than we would like to admit. The theme, therapeutic cloning, is a red-hot one, and while it’s not mentioned as such often, it is exactly the questions this book asks we would have to answer in our present day, if there was to be a major break-through with cloning in the near future.

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