Never Let Me Go // Kazuo Ishiguro
Classed as science fiction, Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate version of 1970s England. The narrator, Kathy H., reflects on her childhood and adolescence at the seemingly elite Hailsham boarding school with her best friends, Tommy and Ruth. It slowly becomes clear that the pupils of Hailsham and other institutions around the country are the by-products of therapeutic cloning and are thus forced to donate their vital organs in early adulthood.
Never Let Me Go isn’t really about science fiction at all; Ishiguro explores human nature. Kathy’s relationships and experiences with Tommy and Ruth are recalled in microscopic detail, capturing the rites and rituals of boarding school, the awkwardness of adolescence and first heartbreak perfectly. This only serves to make the morbid undercurrent of the characters’ impending donations and ‘completion’ all the more disturbing.
What cements this book as a favourite, however, is its haunting portrayal of human passivity. While the bleak acceptance of the characters’ fate initially seems anticlimactic (I, personally, was hoping for a clone revolt), it is strangely realistic – they don’t know any other way of life. The rest of the world’s ability to turn a blind eye to the systematic slaughter around them is also shocking, but is it really so different from our own behaviour? Living in capitalist Western society, we all indirectly profit from the deprivation of others; we are sustained by the butchery of animals. To some extent, the struggle of the Hailsham gallery to prove that clones have souls mirrors our own attempts to alleviate the atrocities that occur in the world today. If anything, Ishiguro’s thought-provoking novel is a book that makes you think and, in a world of increasing technology where the world of Never Let Me Go is an ever more likely reality, to be able to think for ourselves is an ever important skill.
Words by Rose Wolfe-Emery