#38 [2019/CBR11] "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro

After being comfortably single for quite some time, I got myself a gentleman friend. Fortunately, he's a reader as well, and he was shocked when he found out that I had not read Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro. He immediately loaned me his copy, and I was thrilled to have another book to read. Fortunately, I really liked this book. Perhaps it didn't affect me as strongly as it did him, but I really liked the writing, and it made me think.

When a friend of mine heard what book I was going to read, she immediately blurted out some spoilerish information, which changed how I read the book. I'm not sure why she did that, but it was pretty annoying, and I don't want to do that to anyone else. So, very generally, the book is about a special school called Hailsham. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are three friends who attend this school until they are sixteen. This book is about their lives and their interpersonal relationships. If you haven't read it but want to, it's probably best to stop reading this review now.

Never Let Me Go is written from Kathy's perspective as she recounts her time at Hailsham, a unique boarding school. The world is very similar to ours, but as the kids grow up, the reader discovers that the children are clones and will be used for body parts.

When you have a story line involving this kind of injustice, with people suffering so much and dying so early, you'd expect some kind of heroic attempt at freedom. I was half expecting it to turn into that Ewan MacGregor and Scarlett Johansson movie The Island, but I was very wrong. Ishiguro focuses on the nuanced relationships between the three main characters as well as how the truth of their lives slowly permeates their minds until it is something that feels inevitable.

The three friends split up shortly after school ends, and it is near the end of their lives that they come back together, realizing the truth of their feelings and how important they are to each other. After one last, optimistic try for a respite from surgery and death, they quietly go to their fate. Part of what makes this book so troubling and sad is that Kathy and Tommy simply accept their fate in the end. Realistically, there were no heroics, just a plaintive appeal when there was no hope to begin with.

Ishiguro made his characters clones with a very limited life. This was disturbingly relatable. As kids we don't really understand the world and we think everything is possible. A lot of our knowledge happens without us really understanding where it came from. And before we know it, it's too late; our lives are stuck on a trajectory that we might not have expected, and we've let the people closest to us slip away. It's only near the end that we see how important they all are to us. This quiet book is surrounded by the melancholy of lost chances.

The only thing that didn't quite work for me was that I wondered as I read why they didn't have problems with clones rebelling--or at the very least killing themselves. The clones were facing pain and death with no possible reprieve. I would think that suicide would be an appealing option.

Anyway, this was a very memorable, moving book. I read this book ages ago now, and many details are still clear in my mind. I think I might need to read some other books by Ishiguro now.

"What I'm not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time."