Book Review- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go -Kazuo Ishiguro

This book is a strange experience. I walked into it with no idea of the genre, characters, or premise. Being the first Ishiguro book I have ever laid my hands on, even the author’s style was something I had no clue of. But I think that it was the best way to experience this book. The characters grow on you over time, the sense of nostalgia and yearning for the past is a feeling you share with them as the book progresses. And with the way Ishiguro builds his narrator, context and immersion are inversely proportionate; the less you know about the book the better.
I call it a strange experience because though it is categorized as a “heartbreaker” and as “melancholic,” I didn’t relate to these labels. For me this novel was a showcase of how different people deal with the past; some are aggressive and avoidant, some are obsessive, and some pretend like it never even happened, and the greatest part of this experience was being in the dark of what aspects of the character’s shared past mattered, until the very end.

The character’s find themselves in an elite boarding school called Hailsham, and all they are told is that the outside world is different to them, and they will need to be ready to fulfill a specific duty when the time comes. That’s all I knew when I began the book, and I fared pretty well. What I found out (quite late in the novel) is that Kathy, Tommy and Ruth (the three main characters) are not human. They are clones who are being reared from childhood so their internal organs can be harvested through a ‘donation.’ Ishiguro poses multiple philosophical questions regarding the right to life, whether created life can be deemed human and the moral implications of extracting essential organs without consent. But all of these heavy- handed questions take a backseat to what I thought was the actual plot; a group of friends dealing with the loss of their past, while subsequently being unprepared for their unpredictable yet fateful future.

I would classify this book as a coming of age story, because we see the maturity of the main character, Kathy, as the novel progresses. We are led to believe that she is a part of something special, something great, only to be revealed that she is a literal object for the human population to exploit, in the most morbid sense. The whole novel we see this build-up to some insane reveal of why Hailsham students were kept ostracized from the world outside, and when that is revealed finally, we wish it never did. The whole time I expected Ruth, Tommy and Kathy to be gifted students with superpowers, but much like the characters in the story, my expectations were

shattered and all I could hold on to was the past, being the events of the novel I had read before.

Ishiguro has shown us a masterclass on how to build emotional experiences. We feel as one with the characters because once we know that they are all destined to die, all we can do is reminisce on the past; to look back at the simpler times when Kathy would narrate a humorous story from her childhood, or when Ruth and her first became friends. Much like Kathy we see ourselves holding on to the happier past, simply because we cannot stomach the reality we have thrust upon us.

The narration is also no mistake. By creating this fluid ping-pong effect between events, Ishiguro has created a seamless connection in Kathy’s memories, and in some ways, in our perception of the novel. Kathy jumps to and from a variety of events, telling us about a specific road trip to Norfolk, and then letting us know that she’ll get back to that story later. Not only does this make the narration more personal and intimate, it imitates how we think of memories; we kind of just jump back and forth between different past instances in our mind. That way of story- telling really makes the book hard to put down. Not to mention how Ishiguro ties everything together in a neat knot in the final few chapters, featuring two characters you never thought you’d see again.

The premise of the story is simple, and the philosophical arguments it puts forward unnecessary. But what made this book a completely different experience was its writing style, and its use of nostalgia; not only as a theme but as a major plot device.

“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.”
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Jagruti Dialani