Austinist Book Review: Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go"
Born in Japan, raised in Britain, Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of a little stack of novels. The most famous of these is "The Remains of the Day," about an aging butler on the road trip of the century; the most recent is the excellent "Never Let Me Go" (Knopf, April 2005), about a trio of people who will never get to be aging anythings, because they are destined to meet an untimely not-quite-death. They do get to go on a road trip, but only to Norfolk.
Ishiguro is a traditonal kind of writer. His books are self-contained, not self-referential. In a recent interview with the Atlantic Unbound, he made a claim that most popular novelists could not:
I feel that I am in all these novels, but not in the sense that there's a character who is me. Not only haven't I put myself in, I don't think I've ever consciously taken someone I know in real life, changed their name and a few details, and put them in a book.
We suppose that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the other approach, but his sure is a nice change of pace.
In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro puts his disappearing act to work, wresting an absorbing narrative from the point of view of Kathy H. Generally loyal and decent, with the occasional flash of passive-aggressiveness, she is the kind of person whom, if encountered by Austinist in real life, wouldn’t leave the premises without a “Kick Me” sign. That would be cruel of us, though, because destiny has already clapped such a sign on her.
[Continued, with SPOILERS, after the jump...]
Kathy, and her fellow students at a boarding school called Hailsham, are clones, not clones in the usual boarding school sense of people with last names for first names, but honest-to-goodness creepy people, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (you know--clones). They’ve been cloned to have their organs harvested for donation to sick Brits; in a grotesque variation on the theme of digging one’s own grave, they while away the time before their organs are ripe as “carers” for the clones who have already become “donors.”
Elements of the plot, clearly, are fantastic. But approached as science fiction, “Never Let Me Go” would be disappointing, like R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe”—you keep hanging on for a climax that never quite comes. Their circumstances are unsettling, but not horrifying.
Our sanguinity may stem from Kathy's. Even as an adult, realizing the starkly circumscribed future available to her, she's preoccupied by schoolday banalities, like the true origins of a coveted pencil case. This is apparently not because she's afraid to confront mortality; it's just the blockheaded superficiality common to us all. Kathy H. and Co. clomp through the day thinking about sexual liaisons, their own and those of others. They display only occasional flashes of pique at their genteel march to a well-cared-for death, and although discontented, they make no plans to escape. They are copies of people, it seems, not just at the molecular level.
