In Never Let Me Go, we are introduced to Hailsham, a private school in the English countryside, by Kathy H., a 31-year-old alumna of the institution. Kathy identifies herself as a “carer” only a few months shy of becoming a “donor,” an impending transition that makes her look back upon her years at Hailsham. In her reminiscences, we meet her two closest childhood friends, Ruth and Tommy D. All the characters are drawn with remarkable attention to detail, with mundane facts faithfully catalogued, and deepened with complexity. Kathy’s even-tempered skills of observation are as revealing about her own character as the recounting of Tommy’s firey spirit and Ruth’s imagination and willfulness. Her precise, documentary narration sets the tone for the novel, that neither questions nor explains the strange terms such as “donors,” “carers,” and “completion.”
It’s clear that the students at Hailsham are special: they are shunned by the outside world–the “normals”–as much as they are cultivated by their “guardians.” But why? Through the richly depicted characterizations, Kazuo Ishiguro reveals the truth of the characters’ destinies piece by piece. Just as the students are “told but not told” about their origins and their fates, the reader must make inferences to determine the truth, gathering clues from rumors and conversations. The perfect pitch of the narration combines with gradual discovery to make a masterpiece in obliqueness.
Relating the truth in full would undermine the excellence of the reading experience, but suffice it to say that Ishiguro is weighing ethics and the acceptance of evil in the same way he did in his classic Remains of the Day. Here, Ishiguro takes on the ethics of scientific advancement, but as the topic is never addressed directly, it falls a long way short of moralizing or didacticism. Though the dystopia that incrementally comes into view has elements in common with those in science fiction classics, the very human, very plausible world is at once more understated and more disarming. The reader is left to contemplate the implications alone, when the magnitude of this exceptionally written and astoundingly powerful work finally sink in.
Read a Village Voice review here; read a review at the Agony Column Book Reviews and Commentary here.