This review contains spoilers.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is probably his most well-known novel, which doubtless has something to do with its sensational premise. It’s narrated by 30-year-old Kathy, who’s remembering her childhood at what appears to be a traditional English boarding school. Except it slowly becomes clear that every student at Hailsham is a clone whose eventual fate is to be slaughtered for their vital organs.
Not that the novel ever says so in such explicit terms. Indeed, its power lies precisely in the gap between Kathy’s matter-of-fact, almost affectless narration (“This was all a long time ago so I might have some of it wrong…”) and the terrible reality she is describing. Never Let Me Go proceeds in euphemism, in half-truths, in little significant silences. Having your vital organs taken from you is “donating”; dying is “completing”. We only find out what these things mean gradually; like the children at Hailsham, we are, in the words of one of their guardians, “told and not told”.
(I wonder what it would have been like to read this book without knowing its premise in advance? But then I might not have read it at all, so that’s really a pointless thought.)
One of the questions I asked myself when I was thinking about this post was “what’s this novel about?” Because if there’s one thing it’s not about, it’s cloning. Ishiguro has no interest in worldbuilding, in the scientific coherencies of his conceit. He doesn’t ask why, if science has advanced far enough that humans can be cloned reliably in their hundreds or thousands, the technology of his world still looks like that of the 1990s. Or what the point is of having clones care for donors before they become donors themselves. Or just how British society came to accept the farming of humans. And so on.
No; the key to the novel is in that horrific sucking gap between and behind Kathy’s words: the gap that is the Gothic unspoken. And the thing that the book refuses to speak is death. I think Kathy acknowledges maybe once that “completion” actually means “dying”; certainly the word is hardly ever used. There’s also a chillingly elegiac quality to the novel – chilling given Kathy’s young age; she speaks as though she’s going to retire soon, of a “change of pace” when she’ll have time to settle down, take stock, revisit favourite pieces of music. In fact, we understand slowly, terribly, she is soon to become a donor. Having seen most of her friends die as a carer, she is soon to die herself. Again, she never acknowledges this overtly; it’s a knowledge that haunts the novel, haunts us.
So: Never Let Me Go is a novel about death. Its inexorability; our inability to change the fact of it. Kathy’s narration is affectless because there is no emotion that will affect the ultimate truth of death. She accepts the trap she is caught in because there is literally nothing else she can do, as there is nothing we can do about our own mortality. At one point, she acts on an old rumour that clone couples can defer their deaths if they can prove that they truly love each other; the rumour turns out, of course, to be false, because even love cannot stand in the face of death. (Her relationship is, like everything else she describes, strangely emotionless, given that she’s trying to prove she is in True Love.)
It’s a bleak novel. It’s also compulsively readable: I raced through the pages, trying to find out what happened next, what new truths would be revealed, how Kathy would save herself, only to find instead, eventually, that there was no next, only the imminent incursion of the great and unspeakable Real: death. There is no rebellion against the system the novel describes, either personal or political, just acquiescence and resignation.
The question the novel raises in its final pages, whether it’s better to know the full bleakness of your future straight up, or to cling to art and humanity and culture, is one that’s going to stay with me for a while. I don’t have an answer. Kathy believes the guardians at Hailsham were wrong to shelter her and her friends from what awaited them. But as Hailsham’s old headmistress points out, at least that way they had something of a life; they had art and purpose and direction and a childhood.
So as well as a novel about death, this is a novel about meaning. How we make it. What we do with it. Whether meaning is illusory, paper over the cracks of our symbolic world; whether it’s necessary despite its flimsiness.
It’s appropriate that a novel full of silences refuses to give us any answers.
The English Student 