Can you appreciate a book without particularly liking it? That was my reaction to Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 speculative or experimental or science-fiction novel (read the review then pick your adjective), Never Let Me Go.
Never Let Me Go focuses on three characters – Tommy, Ruth, and the novel’s narrator Kathy H. – who are students at what seems to be an upscale private school called Hailsham in what seems to be England in the 1980s. But something isn’t quite right.
The disquiet begins with the first chapter in which an adult Kathy talks about her work as a “carer” for “donors”. The story quickly returns to Kathy’s childhood at Hailsham where the students are only taught art, where the teachers are called “guardians”, and where not only are parents and the outside world never mentioned, but where they seem to barely exist.
As it turns out, there is a good reason for all these strange facts. The students of Hailsham are clones who are being raised to adulthood for the singular purpose of providing organ donations to “normal” men and women. The last donation is fatal.
And with that realization, we follow Ishiguro down his rabbit hole, and pop up in the world of Kafka or Beckett (as other reviewers have well noted before me); but unlike the fantastical worlds of Gregor Samsa’s middle-class family apartment, or Vladimir and Estragon’s desolate country road, the world of Never Let Me Go never quite achieves a coherent internal logic. Which means I don’t think the novel is an entirely successful experiment.
But before I get to these objections, let me talk about what I think Ishiguro did right.
The Flat Affect of Kathy H. Is Pitch Perfect. And Hard to Take
Kathy H.’s narrative voice in Never Let Me Go is cool – even cold – dispassionate, and elusive. She leaves an enormous amount unsaid about the feelings and experiences of clone donors. They all seem to embrace their fate with a combination of resignation and acceptance. The four stages of donations are not described. Post-operative pain or complications are vaguely acknowledged, at best. Every donor dies off the page. No one knows where the bodies are buried. If they are buried.
Kathy H. describes strong emotions, even in herself, with a matter-of-fact tone that prevents us from feeling them. She doesn’t seem to want our sympathy, and her coolness makes our empathy harder.
But all this seems exactly right. Asking someone to remain alive in feeling who has been bred and raised like cattle; who has helped the people she loves die in the service of a society that treats them as spare parts; and who herself is now facing the same death – all that is too much.
Kathy H. should be shut down as person. And if that makes our empathy harder, then it should be harder, because it is a catastrophic lack of empathy in Never Let Me Go that makes the genocidal slavery of the clones possible.
And I would go further and say since any injustice committed by one human against another has as its foundation a failure of empathy, then the novel pushes us to strengthen the quality which is the solution to its (fantastical) horrors.
Never Let Me Go: An Inadequate Portrait of Human Life
You might think after that statement I don’t have any serious criticisms of Never Let Me Go. But I do.
My first criticism is based on the indications that Ishiguro wants us to understand the experience of Kathy H. and Tommy and Ruth as universal. We know this explicitly from the February 2005 interview Ishiguro gave to The Guardian in which he said:
There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? … Most of the things that concern them concern us all.
We also know it implicitly because it is not just Kathy H. who responds to her fate with resignation and acceptance. Every clone responds with resignation and acceptance. If there are variations from these two emotions in the world of Never Let Me Go, we have no report of them.
This is a barren and withered portrait of human life; and while it is an accurate description of some human lives, it is entirely inadequate representation of the human race I know.
That race, too, strives with might and contends with blood. That race, too, loves with a fierceness that will break before it quits. That race, too, rejoices and despairs. That race, too, knows beauty as well as horror. That race, too, seethes for justice in the face of injustice. That race, too, believes beyond all reason, beyond the heavy evidence of experience. That race, too, endures and endures.
Where are these lives too in Never Let Me Go?
Clone Organ Donors: Extraneous and Finally, a Distraction
My other problem with Never Let Me Go is that I think it was a mistake for Ishiguro to situate his science-fiction nightmare in what otherwise appears to be England in the middle-late 20th century.
It would have been fine if Ishiguro had transformed the premise into something more familiar: say a children’s cancer ward in which Kathy H. could have been an orphan and ward of the state, the other characters had dysfunctional families, and so on. Then Ishiguro could still have explored the things in which he says he was most interested without all the fussing with clones.
Or he could have set Never Let Me Go in some dystopian alternate Earth-like world sometime in the past or future, in which it would be easy to accept the clones because that’s what happened in this world. (Think of Panem in The Hunger Games.) That would also have been fine and easy to do.
But as it is in Never Let Me Go, I kept stopping and saying to myself: “Wait, exactly how does this clone-donor society thing work again?”
How did England, barely ten years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the exposure of the death camps, and the end of the Nurenberg Trials, transform itself from a reasonable progressive Western society – as these things go – into a moral monster? Did the rest of the Allied powers acquiesce or participate? How did England get the entire medical profession to ignore the Hippocratic Oath? Where there no objections from the religious communities? Did anyone object? Who was making money from this? Was there an underground railroad for clones? What was the system of control? As young adults, the clones seem to be able to roam at will. What stopped them from disappearing into society, where they would be indistinguishable from other human beings? Why didn’t the clones go all Rambo on the murderous bastards running the system? As an American, I can name entire states – hello, Texas – that would rise up in violent defense of themselves. How did science perfect cloning months after the discovery of the DNA double helix, but still need another 30 years to invent the Walkman?
Also, I’m not a big fan of the novel of social comment, but the premise clearly suggests that our societies are capable of such actions, but doesn’t go any further with the suggestion. This combination of provocative and perfunctory doesn’t sit well.
Should You Read Never Let Me Go?
Never Let Me Go is two books in many ways. As the story of three people dealing with horrors not at all dissimilar from real ones in the world today, I thought it was pretty good. As a speculative science-fiction novel, it would have needed to speculate much harder and much more thoroughly to be a success
I found the novel so haunting and sad in a beautiful way. It also made me realize how short life is. Kathy and the others knew their lives were short and accepted that, and didn’t fight back. I found it chilling and it made me appreciate life more.
I also found Ishiguro’s choice to have the story told as mostly through memories particularly effective. It gave a nostalgic tone to the story, a sense of longing to a better past, to innocence that was then lost…
I think my over-busy machine mind got in the way of me feeling those things, which were certainly there, and well done by Ishiguro. When I’m reading a book, I like to pop the hood to and take a look at the engine: exactly how is this thing put together and how does it run? Also as I think you could tell, I had a hard time getting around the morality of the premise. My mother is very ill and in the world of Never Let Me Go, Kathy H.’s death could cure her. Would I make the choice? What if it were one of my children? I might, I’m not making any promises, but it would be a heavy sin to carry.
Opened the review with trepidation because I loved the novel (with reservation) and the title which makes me sad and I had no idea what your opinion would be. It’s fair I think. Overall I remember the book with fondness (can I say that about such a topic?) but then you bring in Waiting for Godot which was a seminal study moment in my life and I am now worried that on reread I won’t like it as much.
Oh dear, it is not my intention to spoil the memory of any book for a reader, loyal or otherwise, but I do have a certain talent for it. My wife forbids me to read some books she has read because she expects I’ll say it’s fine, but then won’t be able to help myself from dissecting it, sometimes with unseemly glee once I get going. I’m also aware that Ishiguro also seems to broadcast on a frequency that my radio does not tune in well, so the problem is as much or more that I’m not a good reader for him, than a flaw in his work. Mea culpa.
I read a novel some years ago that parallels this, but the thing I remember about it is that when each clone finally left, they were expecting to be going to a better place ‘outside’. Was that in this novel? I will have to read it again
No sign of religious belief in Never Let Me Go, which may be a relief. If any of the normal humans had told the clones they were doing God’s will I probably would have screamed. But then they didn’t have the consolation either.
Great review! Some of the questions that are asked in this post are mostly the questions thrown by the readers who didn’t like the book. Because the backdrop of the novel has elements of science fiction, I think it can’t be helped to have those questions asked. However, I do feel that it’s a novel that deals more with hopelessness than anything else.
Hopelessness does seem like the right word, maybe even the best word, to describe what is going on with Kathy and Ruth and Tommy. There is certainly no sign in the novel that they can escape the fate their society has chosen for them, and that being so, I think it would be unbearable to live squarely facing the facts of that fate every day. So they cling to what is bearable, their complicated love for one another, what makes them happy now, and their memories of happiness in the past. I can accept that. It is hard to take, of course, and taking it is harder for me because much of their suffering comes not from an inescapable fact of the human condition, but from a society choosing to cause that suffering. Also think Ishiguro created a self-inflicted and avoidable “suspension of disbelief” problem, which bothered me more than it bothered other people. Not saying I’m more right than them. It’s just my experience of the book.
Peter, your reviews are always unconventional and unusual. When put under your lens, the books reveal startling hitherto unnoticed facets.
I do agree with you in the seemingly anachronistic circumstances of the book. Reading about things like that in a futuristic Asmiov like setting would have been more palatable an idea. What you say about the portrayal of Kathy is also not to my liking.
Thanks as always. Since I tend to review books which aren’t brand new, and since most of my readers tend to have already read the book, or have a strong impression of it, I need to do something other than what a “hot off the press” review would do or I don’t see myself being of much use. Also, when you say the portrait of Kathy is not to your liking, is it my view of her you don’t like — and not liking that would be perfectly fine, of course — or is it reading a novel in which a person like Kathy is the narrator that doesn’t sound good?
Yes, the narrator has to be anything but passive. It’s a personal opinion though.
I often feel the same way. Occasionally, I feel a little down for a day or two, and during those days, I really don’t want to live in the mind of someone like Kathy H. because it makes me feel worse. Tricky thing about art: emotional response is absolutely essential to its success AND it’s entirely subjective.