Book review – “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro

I am very happy to be at the stage in life where I read books that have been recommended to me by my children (all now adults). This is one which my elder daughter enjoyed reading over the summer last year and which she thought I would too. She was not wrong; it is hard not to be a fan of Kazuo Ishiguro, one of our finest living writers, internationally acclaimed, winner of the Booker Prize in 1989 (for The Remains of the Day) and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. The Remains of the Day was adapted for screen in 1993 and turned into a highly-acclaimed film starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. Never Let Me Go was also made into a film in 2010 (though I did not know this) with a stellar cast which included Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield. Ishiguro has quite the pedigree and from what I have seen seems a very nice and down to earth chap. (And a British ‘Sir’ to boot.)

[This review contains some spoilers.]

I read and reviewed Klara and the Sun when it came out  in 2021, a novel about some of the potential repercussions of our obsession with technology and AI in particular (I posted about my own sense of alarm about this last month). It looked ahead to some future date when the advance was seemingly beyond our ability to arrest. The world it portrayed was at once familiar and extremely strange. Never Let Me Go bears some similarities in that it explores human cloning. Some readers may recall ‘Dolly the Sheep’ the first successfully cloned mammal who was born in Scotland in 1996 and died in 2003. At the time, there was a lot of fear-mongering about the consequences of this extraordinary achievement and some justified debate about how we as a human race should manage and control the inevitable advance of this particular field of science. In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro imagines a world where this science is normalised into everyday life and what that means for the people involved.

The narrator of the story is Kathy, a woman still quite young when she is looking back on her life, and in particular at her childhood, from the perspective of one whose living purpose is to care for her peers, the others who share the same destiny as her. Kathy was brought up in an English boarding school (‘Hailsham’) where the staff are known to the young people as “the guardians”. This was in the late 1990s (when Dolly the sheep was all over the news?). Kathy tells us all about her life there, about the daily life of the children, about their relationships and petty differences, about the trivial things that were important to them. At first it is not clear to the reader exactly what is going on at Hailsham, but part way through, when reference is made to their future status as “donors” or “carers” it becomes increasingly and terrifyingly clear what these young people are for – their purpose is organ harvesting. They are all clones of someone on the outside (who they refer to as ‘models’ or ‘possibles’). 

When we think about clones we might think about robots (rather like Klara in Klara and the Sun), but the children at Hailsham have been created and have all the usual aspects of human personality. This presents challenges to how they are raised and ‘Hailsham’ was originally conceived as a place where their lives could be made rich, where they could develop relationships with one another (including sexual relationships) and be given some purpose in life until they would be required as donors. But of course, their lives are completely pointless, as Ishiguro shows us, their future is bleak; at some point they will donate, once, twice, perhaps more, after which they will weaken and die. By showing us the human frailty of the young people (petty squabbles, jealousies and meanness) he shows how they are just like us, how we could be just like them, just a few steps away from being nothing but an organ incubator. It would be easier if they were dehumanised (like Dolly). 

I found this a powerful novel that I have thought about much since I finished it a few months ago. As I have been thinking about it for this review, I have dipped back into sections of the book and seen things I did not see first time around, the pathos in Kathy, Ruth and Tommy’s trip to Norfolk for example, to search for Ruth’s “possible”, like a search for a mother, an origin story, but of course, the search is fruitless and deeply disspiriting to them all. It is a moment of realisation for them all – there is no-one out there for them. 

This book has to be on a list of must-read books of the twenty-first century.