Never Let Me Go

#430
Title: Never Let Me Go
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 2005
294 pages

This melancholic novel is science fiction to the extent that it is an alternate 1980s (more or less) where, as we learn gradually, the protagonist and all of her school friends are clones who have been grown as organ donors. However, the reader doesn't learn this until far into the narrative, where one of the teachers names it explicitly in a moment of conflict and frustration. Though this is something of a bombshell for the reader, the narrator and her friends have an overt response (yes, we know that), and a covert response (they're a bit embarrassed by the teacher's outburst). The recognition of this discrepancy between the reader's response and the narrator's is a good encapsulation of why this novel is truly creepy--the children all know they're being raised for parts, but they keep this knowledge diffuse and suppressed. In some ways this is an ultimate British novel, the kind I would read as an adolescent and wonder, what just happened? what gave offense? why has this relationship suddenly ended? It was all too subtle for me, and Ishiguro turns that subtle, squeamish sensibility into a determinant in the book's action. The students have been slowly but clearly taught that their duty is to become spare parts, but they don't think about this much, or question it, or really even talk about it. Thus, theme #1 is about inevitability and the passivity of a British underclass. This is no Logan's Run--there is no protest, no flight, no rage against the machine. In fact, after their education the clones wander around more or less aimlessly until they just decide it's time to become carers (people who take care for the donors) and, after that, to request to become donors. Donors die in no more than four donations. One does one's duty, in one's understated and constrained way.

The second theme is existential. The directors of Hailsham, the school that this group of clones attends, is on the model of A Fine British Education for the Colonials. This is partly due to altruistic scruples, and partly to the attempt to demonstrate that the clones have souls, i.e., are (like those persons from colonial climes) fully human. This is revealed toward the end of the book, but the form it takes throughout is the pervasive, underlying question of what gives a life its meaning. Like the students in Lev Grossman's dyspeptic The Magicians, the Hailsham students find that being a special student at a special school does not necessarily prepare you to do anything. Similarly, Octavian Nothing learned that no matter how erudite and cultured he and his mother became, they were still just property. The Hailsham students grasp for straws of meaning where they can--in the teacher's words, in made-up narratives about the teachers and each other, in their relationships, and in their interpretations of Hailsham's policies. Ultimately, none of it matters. The Hailsham graduates will still become donors, no matter how beautiful the art they produce or what literary works they read. Again, this is all excruciatingly understated, but definitely present. It certainly contrasts with the intense anger expressed by writers in formerly colonized countries, who go to school only to discover that the promise of freedom is a lie, and that their opportunities and options are not equal. That the narrator of Never Let Me Go is reasonably happy with her life is more chilling than any talk of clones or souls.