As compelling as it is, this book totally freaked me out. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a “coming of age story” about the “coming of age” of people (clones) who are being raised so that the vital organs can be harvested.
It is complete with teenage angst, romance and girl infighting (not too different from the movie Mean Girls based on Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosiland Wiseman). However, the backdrop is the life of these clones who “know, but don’t know” that their whole existence is to provide organs to “normals”.
It is probably obvious that a book with this premise would tackle (or at least provoke contemplation about) ideas related to organ donations, cloning, research and even food production (a la the movie Fast Food Nation). It is filled with an endless stream of ethical and moral questions asked in an interesting way. But, that isn’t what got me.
What got me was the metaphor for life. We are born, we become “carers” (part of the story line) and we die (all the while we have a bit of nostalgia for our childhood home and history).
Never Let Me Go brings you along at a fast clip for the most part, but it does get bogged down in a kind of literary self-gratification (the kind that people say “what an excellent way of exposing character”), which gets a little boring:
When I found myself alone, I’d stop and look for a view – out a window, say, or through a doorway into a room – any view so long as there were no people in it. I did this so that I could, for a few seconds at least, create the illusion the place wasn’t crawling with students, but that instead Hailsham was this quiet, tranquil house where I lived with just five or six others. (90)
It is a deep and disturbing plot line, but it has moments of humor:
You could go around implying you’d read all kinds of things, nodding knowingly when someone mentioned, say, War and Peace, and the understanding was that no one would scrutinize your claim too rationally. You have to remember, since we’d been in each other’s company constantly since arriving at the Cottages, it wasn’t possible for any of us to have read War and Peace without the rest noticing. But just like with the sex at Hailsham, there was an unspoken agreement to allow for a mysterious dimension where we went off and did all this reading. (122)
Last, even though the clones know the end of life will come (don’t we all?), the narrator still approaches it in a manner that is void of the context (which, I guess, if it is the only existence you have know, you would do):
And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I’d always assumed I’d plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever. (213)
All in all, Never Let Me Go is super chilling, but well worth reading.
