This is by Kazuo Ishiguro, and it was published in 2005.

It's in the same boat as Atonement in that it's another that I inadvertently ticked on the interactive NYT list last year, only to later realize I hadn't read this one, and was confusing it with When We Were Orphans...

So now I'm no longer guilty of deception. Which is important. If they're keeping all these statistics on you, they might as well be accurate.

Never Let Me Go came in at No. 9 on that official list, and also on the readers' list; it was shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize; and it's recommended on Five Books in a couple of categories. It's Ishiguro's most-read novel; it has been translated into 50 languages; and it has been turned into a movie, with a screenplay by Alex Garland, a Japanese stage play, a Japanese TV series, and a British play.

Definitely worth reading for its own sake, therefore, and not just to make an honest person of myself.

And, of course, it's now 20 years old, so there has been a bit of commentary marking that anniversary.

The story is set in England, in the late 1990s. Our narrator is Kathy H, aged 31. She has been a "carer" for over 11 years, but her story flips backwards and forwards between now and the time when she was at Hailsham, the boarding school she attended.

It's one of those scenarios where you understand exactly what she's telling you -- and yet you don't. Presented to you quite prosaically, absolutely without drama, are terms like recovery centre, guardians, collections, donating, and completing. There's a reference to drugs, pain, and exhaustion. But there's nothing emotional about it. The tone is flat.

Before I read it, I knew there was some twist to the story, but I knew no details. And that's definitely the state in which to approach the story. So, if you've not read Never Let Me Go, stop reading this, and go there first. Ishiguro expends a lot of effort on only gradually letting us in on what it's all about. You don't want to miss that slow reveal.



Bit by bit, then, alongside the ordinary trials of being at school -- whether you're "in" or not, who your favourite teacher is, who's quarrelling with whom, what games you play, with which imaginary characters and scenarios, etc -- we hear about events that are harder to explain. Someone known as "Madame", who is clearly repulsed by the students, comes regularly to take away examples of their artwork; the children are aware that they're different from their guardians and from others outside the school; the emphasis on not smoking is firmer than usual; they're aware that they can never have babies.

But we're about a third of the way through before we start to get a clear idea of what is going on. This is courtesy of Miss Lucy, one of the guardians, who is saddened that the students are gaily talking about their ambitions for the future, and feels they really ought to have a clearer idea of how things are really going to turn out: "The problem, as I see it," she says, "is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand... Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do... You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided."

Kathy says she knew vaguely about donations from the age of six or seven. Tommy, a fellow-student, who later becomes the boyfriend first of Ruth, and then of Kathy, thinks the information they were given was very carefully timed, so that they were always just too young to fully comprehend the latest snippet, and yet at some level did take it in.

What you know, and what you imagine, and the ways you preserve and compartmentalize what you know and imagine, are key themes of the book.


Cromer, Norfolk, 2020. "Norfolk was England's 'lost corner', where all the lost property found in the country ended up. Somehow this idea caught on and soon had become accepted fact virtually throughout our entire year... What was important to us, as Ruth said one evening... was that 'when we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken... We could always go and find it again in Norfolk.'"

The second section, where the flashbacks refer to the next facility the students move to, known as the Cottages, follows up some of the implications of the new clarity they have gained.

A group of them visit Cromer, because someone thinks he has seen Ruth's "possible" there: "The basic idea behind the possibles theory was simple, and didn’t provoke much dispute. It went something like this. Since each of us was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for each of us, somewhere out there, a model getting on with his or her life. This meant, at least in theory, you’d be able to find the person you were modelled from... We all of us, to varying degrees, believed that when you saw the person you were copied from, you’d get some insight into who you were deep down, and maybe too, you’d see something of what your life held in store."

But the "possible" theory doesn't hold. The woman is way too respectable. To cover any disappointment, Ruth claims she never believed the story anyway: "They don’t ever, ever, use people like that woman. Think about it. Why would she want to? We all know it, so why don’t we all face it... We’re modelled from TRASH. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps... That other woman in there... Do you think she'd have talked to us like that if she'd know what we really were? What do you think she'd have said if we'd asked her? 'Excuse me, but do you think your friend was ever a clone model?' She'd have thrown us out."

And that, 57 per cent through the book, is the first of only two occurrences of the word "clone".

The Cromer scene is central in another way too. The title refers to an incident that takes place while the students are still at Hailsham. Madame sees Kathy dancing to a song called Never Let Me Go. She's hugging a pillow, as though it's a baby. Madame is very moved: "[She was] staring at me through the doorway with that same look in her eyes she always had when she looked at us, like she was seeing something that gave her the creeps." The cassette with the song on it goes astray, but on this expedition to the seaside, Kathy and Tommy (who are still not an item, but who clearly care for each other) find it again. Ruth, at this point still Tommy's girlfriend, is a little miffed at this bit of togetherness, and does her best to sabotage the growth of anything further.

Meanwhile, there's still this rumour floating around that students with partners can defer their donations for a little while. Tommy's guess is that the purpose of Madame's artwork collection is to establish evidence indicating the genuineness of such relationships...



By the time we move into Part Three, things are much grimmer. One of the group that went to Cromer "completed" during her second donation. Ruth "had a really bad first donation", and Kathy becomes her carer. Ruth apologizes for keeping Kathy and Tommy apart. She gives them Madame's address, and urges them to find out about the deferral possibility.

And Ruth reaches her end... So Kathy becomes Tommy's carer (which doesn't impede their relationship). Tommy has now made a third donation. So, using the address Ruth gave them, they go to find Madame. From her (she's actually called Marie-Claude) and Miss Emily (the former head guardian at Hailsham), they learn that there's no truth in the deferral rumour.

And they learn a lot more. In fact, structurally, this is a bit of an information dump. But still, it's the point of the book, so it has to be communicated.

Hailsham was an experiment, they're told, "an example of how we might move to a more humane and better way of doing things". And this is why Madame did her collecting:

"We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all... As you say, why would anyone doubt you had a soul? But I have to tell you, my dear, it wasn’t something commonly held when we first set out all those years ago... All around the country, at this very moment, there are students being reared in deplorable conditions, conditions you Hailsham students could hardly imagine. And now we’re no more, things will only get worse... I hope you can appreciate how much we were able to secure for you. Look at you both now! You’ve had good lives, you’re educated and cultured. I’m sorry we couldn’t secure more for you than we did, but you must realise how much worse things once were... We demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being. Before that, all clones -- or students, as we preferred to call you -- existed only to supply medical science."

This is certainly one of the scary realities of human life: We find out that something is possible, and only then do we wonder about the ethics. It's reminiscent of Frankenstein. And, in this case, by the time people got around to worrying about whether it was actually OK to manufacture human beings as sources of spare parts, it was too late because they'd reached the point where no-one wanted to miss out on the convenience of readily available routes to health. If anyone actually thought about the clones at all, it made it easier if they could be seen as different from real humans -- as less than human, in fact.

So Hailsham is a mitigation exercise. It's the half-way house between a world where clones enjoy all the rights of naturally born human beings, and a world where they're treated like cardboard cartons.

But then came the "Morningdale scandal", where people were offered a chance to genetically engineer children. And that was a step too far... The idea of producing something SUPERIOR to humans frightened everyone silly.

After that, says Miss Emily, the climate changed, and places like Hailsham faded away: "The world didn't want to be reminded how the donation programme really worked. They didn't want to think about you students, or about the conditions you were brought up in. In other words, my dears, they wanted you back in the shadows... There was a certain climate and now it's gone... People's opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process."

This explains why Marie-Claude misinterpreted Kathy's little dance with the "baby". She tells them: "I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn’t really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I’ve never forgotten."



On the way home, Tommy has one of his periodic meltdowns. Kathy holds him until he calms down. He puts his arms around her too: "For a moment, it seemed like we were holding onto each other because that was the only way to stop us being swept away into the night." Except it can't stop them.

Tommy admits that he pretty much always knew... And knowing about Tommy's prescience, we shrink all the more when he tells us: "You know why it is, Kath, why everyone worries so much about the fourth? It’s because they’re not sure they’ll really complete. If you knew for certain you’d complete, it would be easier. But they never tell us for sure..."

Kathy knows there's talk: "How maybe, after the fourth donation, even if you’ve technically completed, you’re still conscious in some sort of way; how then you find there are more donations, plenty of them, on the other side of that line; how there are no more recovery centres, no carers, no friends; how there’s nothing to do except watch your remaining donations until they switch you off. It’s horror movie stuff, and most of the time people don’t want to think about it."

Pause to shudder...

Tommy tells her he doesn't want her to continue as his carer: "I don't want to be that way in front of you."


A very poignant little sketch by Giovanni Alberti

When Kathy hears Tommy is no more, she goes back to Norfolk. She stops at a point where a line of rubbish has collected along a stretch of barbed wire and up in the branches of the trees: "I... imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I’d see it was Tommy, and he’d wave, maybe even call."

***

Ishiguro, reflecting on the novel 20 years after publication, says it has tended to generate two sets of queries. One runs along the lines of why the young people did not rebel; the other speculates on whether this is a sad book or an uplifting one. I can't imagine asking that second question... I see no possible characterization for this book other than straight-down-the-court tragic.

The author doesn't answer directly, but points out: "It seems to me that these most-asked questions about Never Let Me Go arise because of tensions concerning its metaphorical identity. Is this story a metaphor about evil man-made systems that already exist today -- or are in imminent danger of existing -- ushered in by uncontrolled innovations in science and technology? Or, alternatively, is the novel offering a metaphor for the fundamental human condition -- the necessary limits of our natural lifespans; the inescapability of aging, sickness, and death; the various strategies we adopt to give our lives meaning and happiness in the time we have allotted to us. It may be both a strength and a weakness of this novel that it often wishes to be both of the above at one and the same time, thereby setting certain elements of the story in conflict with one another."

Having taken the story at face value, I hadn't considered that second, broader meaning. Ishiguro enlarges on this in an interview where he explains how he was immediately taken with the name of a song he saw listed on a Bill Evans album, and knew that this title, Never Let Me Go, fitted exactly the story he was trying to tell:

"The reason that phrase appealed to me is because it's an unreasonable request. If you said, 'Hold on to me for a long time,' that's OK, that's reasonable. Never Let Me Go I found poignant and moving because the person who makes such a request knows that that just cannot be delivered. It's beyond the gift of anybody, however much that person cares for you, to hold onto you for ever. I think I've always been really drawn to that part of human beings that aspires for something they actually know logically is beyond reach, but there's a part that hopes and yearns for something to do with love, fulfilment, escape from loneliness. So Never Let Me Go, to me, was a great title."

That's so right... In the midst of any moment of happiness, it seems, it's our universal prayer for things to stay like this, or at least not to change for the worse...



And, given the 1990s setting, you can't help but see these events and dilemmas in the neoliberal context of the preceding decades. Commodification, exploitation, and a growing gulf between the rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless -- all this contrasts pathetically with the narrative of the "aspirational individual" so beloved of the Thatcherites. Our clones can aspire all they like (for art, for relationships, for jobs, and when these hopes prove ephemeral, for deferrals and kind carers and definitive completions), but at the end of the day, they get what they get. Which is a future that's out of their control, and -- even though they are all ultimately bound for the same fate -- a them-and-us division between donors and carers.

Part of the reason they acquiesce is the reason we all do: What's the alternative? We're all caught in bodies that will die. We're all caught in systems that for the most part we can't change. Why not make sure that all this is pushed safely to the sidelines? Why dwell on what we can't change?

As Anne Enright comments: "Perhaps this novel stays fresh because it articulates the anxieties of people who grew up in the years after it was published. This is a generation that suspects they are, in one way or another, fodder for an indifferent system." They are still figuring out what it is to be "real", when it is so difficult for them to have any agency in the world.

And yet... We empathize with the clones, of course, because our narrator is one of them, and our hearts aren't made of stone. But it doesn't take much to imagine ourselves, shamefully, in the other camp... We're exploitative beings. We may not currently take organs from creatures of our own manufacture, but a large number of us are certainly adept at taking advantage, in every possible way, of other humans who have ended up with less power.



***

On the negative side, I've referred to the occasional info dump. And the stringing-along techniques by which Ishiguro sustains our sense of bafflement and curiosity can sometimes seem repetitive. Examples:

-- "And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it’s probably because I’m looking at them in the light of what came later -- particularly what happened that day at the pavilion while we were sheltering from the downpour."

-- "But to explain what we were talking about that evening, I'll have to go back a little bit."

-- "It wasn't until a long time afterwards... that I realised just how significant our little encournter in the churchyard had been... So that was what had been happening just before I had that conversation with Ruth in the old bus shelter."

Nevertheless, you have to admit it's very cleverly done. As readers, says David Sexton, we are "quietly, gently, inducted into absolute horror".



***

It's certainly a book that leaves you with much to ponder. As Ishiguro always does, of course.

In 1994, I watched The Remains of the Day, which came out the previous year, and concluded in my diary: "The only one who ends up free is the pigeon released from the drawing-room window."

Ishiguro's first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), was also the first I actually read (in 1999). Verdict: "A subtle, haunting book." I was a little unsure about When We Were Orphans (2000), which I read on a beach in Viet Nam in 2003. I was impressed by the narration, which slowly fills bits in as his memory finds them, so that you uncover the memory process with him, but I found it somehow flat.

In 2006, I watched The White Countess, for which Ishiguro wrote the screenplay. I was middle-of-the-road on that: "it had the Ishiguro stamp -- a good tale, but slightly melodramatic. Beautifully filmed. Elliptical. Faintly unbelievable."

The Unconsoled (1995), which I came to in 2007, left me completely bewildered, but as I wrote at the time: "My mind keeps returning to it, worrying away at it, and that must be to some extent the sign of a good book." Frustrating, though. The narrator never wakes from what seems like a dream: "Nothing really works out, and the reader, as much as the characters, remains profoundly unconsoled."

I think that experience left me a little shy of his work for a while. But now I'm back. It's a thoroughly deserved Nobel Prize for Literature that was in 2017 awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro, "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".