Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most respected and influential writers in the world, particularly in the English-speaking world, alive today. His 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature is a fairly significant indication of that, but he also won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his third novel, The Remains of the Day, and has been short-listed for the prize three more times—including for Never Let Me Go in 2005, the novel I’m including as number 49 (alphabetically) on my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954, nine years after the second American atomic bomb flattened the city. And those Japanese roots strongly influenced his early work, though he moved to England with his parents at the age of five. When with Remains of the Day he found one of his great protagonists in a British butler, his readership broadened as well, and fellow Booker honoree Salman Rushdie praised the novel as Ishiguro’s masterpiece, saying in it he had “turned away from the Japanese settings of his first two novels and revealed that his sensibility was not rooted in one place, but capable of travel and metamorphosis.”
While The Remains of the Day tends to appear on more “Top 100” lists, Never Let Me Go does appear in Time magazine’s Best English Language Novels since 1923 (Time also named it the best novel of 2005), as well as the BBC list of the 100 Greatest British Novels. It also ranked 4th on The Guardian’s 2019 list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. In their Nobel Award proclamation, the Swedish Academy described Ishiguro as a writer “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” That is a perfect introduction to Never Let Me Go, which may be Ishiguro’s most emotionally powerful novel, and one whose characters hold quite a tenuous connection with the world.
The book is Ishiguro’s first foray into the realm of Science Fiction—not spaceships and aliens, but a more foreseeable future, presented here as a kind of alternate reality set in 1990s England. We meet the novel’s protagonist in the first sentence, “My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year.” We aren’t quite sure what a “carer” is—some kind of nurse we probably assume. The “they” that want her to go on with her duties must be her employers, we may assume. At any rate, Kathy doesn’t seem to be completely free to quit this job when she wishes. Kathy’s patients, whom she refers to as “donors,” seem to have even less control of their lives. Only a few pages into the novel, she reveals that one of these donors has “just come through his third donation, it hadn’t gone well, and he must have known he wasn’t going to make it.”
Kathy begins to reminisce about her childhood, spent at a boarding school called Hailsham. The place seems a very normal, if high class, boarding school. You may be lulled into thinking you’re at Hogwarts. The teachers here, called Guardians, keep a close watch on the students at all times, and encourage the students particularly to produce art. The best art will be displayed in the “Gallery,” as chosen by a wealthy a stylish woman called “Madame” who visits the school three times a years and makes her choices. Indeed, art at Hailsham becomes the measure of students’ self-worth, so that when Kathy’s friend Tommy D. is bullied because even though he is good at sports, he’s not so good at art (an irony that lets you know you’re reading fiction), he is told secretly by one of the Guardians that his artistic talent really doesn’t matter, it seems a sacrilege. Of course, as it turns out, it really doesn’t matter. Students are also urged to be very careful of their health, so that smoking, for example, is absolutely forbidden at Hailsham. Friendships and romances bloom among the students, as at any school. Kathy remembers how fond she was of Tommy, and of her best friend Ruth C. She becomes close to Tommy through long talks together after she cares for him when he’s been bullied. As it turns out, though, it is Ruth and Tommy who begin a relationship.
One of the students’ favorite teachers, or Guardians, at Hailsham is a very young teacher named Miss Lucy. At one point Miss Lucy, under great stress and apparently unable to keep up the veneer of normality at the school, reveals to the students that their plans for the future are pointless, that they were born (cloned) and are being raised for the sole purpose of organ transplants, and so are all going to die young when their organs are donated. Miss Lucy is summarily dismissed from the school. The children, shocked by the revelation, nevertheless continue passively with their schoolwork. It’s all they know.
When they are sixteen, Kathy, Tommy and Ruth move into the “Cottages,” along with older students from other schools, preparing to transition into their adult lives and responsibilities, and for the first time are allowed limited time to mingle in the outside world. Here they are led to confront the real fact of their being clones, whose purpose is to perform as organ donors for “originals,” and that they are in this new living arrangement to await notice of when to perform their first “donation.” They may go through three or even four donations, but these will inevitably end in their deaths.
When two older students in the Cottages tell Ruth that they have seen a woman in the outside world that could be the “original” from whom Ruth was cloned, Ruth joins them, along with Kathy and Tommy, on a road trip to see this possible original. But she is disappointed. The trip, however, does produce a ray of hope for Tommy. The older students have heard a rumor that Hailsham students get special treatment, for if a couple can demonstrate that they are truly in love, their “donation” period can be deferred. Tommy believes that, since one of their teachers had mentioned that their art revealed their souls, he and Kathy might receive a deferment by demonstrating their true love through art.
The jealous Ruth manages to drive a wedge between Kathy and Tommy, however, and Kathy ultimately leaves the other two to become a “carer.” She will be a caregiver for a group of donors to whom she is assigned, helping them through the series of operations, their failing health, and finally their “completion.” In this way her own life is extended, but she endures the emotional turmoil of each of her donors.
Ten years after their parting, Kathy becomes Ruth’s carer, and after a difficult first donation, Ruth’s deteriorating health prompts her to try to repair her friendship with Kathy and Tommy. She gives them the address of “Madame,” the woman who had judged the Hailsham students’ art projects, and challenges Tommy and Kathy to visit her and find out the truth about the rumored “exemption.” Of course, I can’t tell you how the book ends because I try to follow the unwritten law of “no spoilers.” But if you think this novel is likely to have a happy ending, I must have done a terrible job describing it.
Like most science fiction, Never Let Me Go takes as a starting point current scientific discoveries or procedures. In this case, like a more advanced Brave New World, Ishiguro takes on genetic engineering and supporting technology, in order to raise questions about what it means to be human (not unlike Ishiguro’s more recent novel, Klara and the Sun, dealing with AI). Are cloned beings as “human” as people born “normally”? Do they even have a soul? The dominant society in Ishiguro’s novel would say no, but reading Kathy’s account will convince you otherwise. Does life have a purpose—and is it the same for cloned individuals as others: to love?
And if the children at Hailsham school are the same as all children everywhere, then their consciousness of their own inevitable death is just a harsher realization of the mortality that all children must come to grips with on entering adulthood. As Telegraph writer Theo Tait has suggested, the myth of “true love” fending off death, or of art giving one a chance at immortality, are ultimately no different from the myths we tell ourselves—or that the novelist Ishiguro tells himself.
There is, by the way, a 2010 film version of Never Let Me Go directed by Mark Romanek. It starred three-time Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan as Kathy; her Pride and Prejudice co-star and two-time Oscar nominee Keira Knightley as Ruth; and twice nominated Andrew Garfield as Tommy. As you might expect, the film was praised for the performances of its cast, and for its fidelity to Ishiguro’s novel. It would be worth viewing, but only after you read the book. Remember the unwritten “no spoilers” law.