Never Let Me Go

A teacher wrote an essay I read recently recommending Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go (Vintage International, 2005).  She extolled the virtues of the book and how much she enjoyed teaching it, and that the final pages always left her in tears.

Ishiguro is probably best known for the novel, Remains of the Day (Vintage International, 1990) and the subsequent Merchant Ivory film (Columbia Pictures, 1993) starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins.  He has a number of novels to his credit, each with a kind of slow moving plot featuring reserved and taciturn characters pitted against more emotional counterparts who struggle against class and sociological definition only to reach a moment of revelation in the climax of the that glacial plot.  Personal freedom, emotion versus reason, the way there are no small moments in life, only the mundane that accumulate into a lifetime of disappointment and isolation with an often profound realization of missed and squandered opportunity.

Never Let Me Go is a bit of a departure for Ishiguro in that it is set in a future where children are cloned and brought up in institutions to become “donors” for others.  They are valued for their organs, not their potential as people in the world.  The story focuses on three of these children as they mature into adulthood:  Kathy, the narrator of the story; Tommy, a high spirited boy who keeps his child-like aura into adulthood; and Ruth, a dominating and manipulative figure who seems to feel most at home pushing the other two to transcend their comfort zones.

After leaving their beloved institution in the English countryside called Hailsham, the three transition to a residential boarding property called the Cottages where they become adults and wait for the next phase of their lives to begin, that of being a “carer.”  In this capacity, they take care of other “donors” as they go through multiple “donations,” meaning organ donations.  Usually by the third or fourth donation, the donor “completes,” or dies.  After serving as carers, Ruth first moves on to the donor stage followed by Tommy.  Kathy remains a carer longer as the voice of the story.

The problem with this novel is that the characters are repeatedly identified in dialogue by their names, but I struggled to formulate a vision of them; they were not real to me.  The last part of the novel is moving and more intense, but the beginning and middle offer little more than normal childhood squabbles and behavior.  Nothing much happens, a common characteristic of Ishiguro’s work, but where in other books this sort of thing works as a character study, these characters seem one dimensional—Tommy with his adolescent innocence; Ruth with her manipulations; and Kathy who is not the insightful narrator she needs to be to make this all work.  When things do happen, scenes with emotional baggage that propel the novel in a new direction, Kathy says they did not discuss what happened with each other.  As a dystopian piece, there is a lack of metamorphosis in plot or character.  There is a rumor that if two clones are in love, they can defer moving to the donor phase.  In the course of the novel, the characters learn, after pages of speculation and hope, that there is no such option.  So off they go.  It is not a devastating revelation because it was always a rumor from the start.  These characters do not really grow or develop into anything more than who they are at the beginning of the novel.  If fiction at its heart is about a conflict that affects the characters and sends them down the road to self-actualization or danger and even death, they must change.  Not here.  Ishiguro leaves them static, and then one by one, they are gone.

Throughout, I found myself wanting them to attack and even subvert the order of things.  I wanted them to at least try to break the chain.  However, this is Ishiguro’s style in other novels, especially Remains of the Day, but in that book, Stevens’ inability to express his emotions and become a self-aware human being is the tragedy of the plot.  There is so much he could have done with his life and he doesn’t, and that is shattering.  I could not connect with Kathy, Ruth and Tommy on that level.  I never wanted to scream at them like I did Stevens:  “Do something! Your life is passing you by!  She loves you; tell her you love her too!”

With respect to the teacher who wrote the article, I wonder how her students connected with these three characters?  The story is set in such rarified air, a world of horrors, very English, certainly, but not one easily recognized by teenagers today.  Part of the success of a coming-of-age novel like this is for readers to see themselves in, and identify with, the characters.  Maybe on the level of someone deciding the life another is expected to live might resonate with readers; these characters have no recourse but to continue on and with the exception of their inquiries about a deferment, really do not actively try to break away.  Their lives are set from the moment their cells begin to divide in the test tube.  They exist for the benefit of others.  Their art work is collected by the teachers and benefactors of Hailsham to prove they have souls.  Some of their teachers know what will happen to them and feel the students are not being given enough information.  All of this exists in a carefully shaded plot, and although the characters are aware of some of it, and have meaningful dialogue with teachers and others in power, they go at least somewhat placidly into their dark dystopian future.

In dystopian fiction, is there a more tragic and disturbing scene than the end of 1984 when Orwell has his character Winston sitting in a café not sure if the woman he sees is Julia or not?  That one scene destroys the reader and lands the emotional punch.  The futility, the desperation, the utter destruction of humanity, that is what makes dystopian fiction work.  Sadly, the characters in Never Let Me Go move through the world to their inevitable conclusion.  “I keep thinking about this river somewhere,” Tommy tells Kathy at the end of the novel, “with the water moving really fast.  And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much.  The current’s too strong.  They’ve got to let go, drift apart.  That’s how I think it is with us.  It’s a shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives.  But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.”  Therein lies the problem; Tommy’s attitude is so pedestrian.  I wanted him to fight for love, fight to subvert the norm, insist that love is stronger and can keep us alive.  Instead, he lets go, negating the title of the novel, and allowing the current to take him away without a fight.