Never Let Me Go [Paperback]

I found this book deeply disturbing and was unsettled for a long time after reading this novel.

The story concerns a group of children who appear to live an idyllic life in school in the country, but an evil fate awaits them the implications of which slowly become clear.

I am very enthusiastic about Ishiguro's prose style, he writes simply and boldly, and the result is not stark but rather beautiful storytelling; each paragraph has an intensity worth savouring. The horror of their situation is revealed calmly, without any fuss or melodrama. The characters have only the language of euphemism to describe the fate which awaits them, and this helps keep the dreadful fate awaiting them a secret. I don't wish to spoil the surprise, by telling anything more explicitly, but suffice to say this is a story of a whole society's evil being visited on a group of people, and how the victims cope or don't.

I recommend this story whole-heartedly.

Never Let Me Go is in some ways more straightforward than most of Kazuo Ishiguro's novels, and more fully comprehensible than any since his masterpiece The Remains of the Day. And yet there is still enough lightness of detail and wealth of moral ambiguity to justify much strokey-chin thought after the last page has been closed, and even to warrant an early re-read.

The setting of the book is "England, late 1990s," but not as we know it. We can tell this even from the limited narrative offered by Kathy, who tells us very little of the real world outside her immediate (and past) environs. There are words dropped innocently but sinisterly: donations, carers, completing, none of which have the meanings we understand. Kathy was a student at Hailsham, a residential institution for children which educated them and encouraged creative expression, but was not quite a school... They are being prepared for lives as 'carers' and 'donors', and they are a form of experiment made possible by advances in technology which, in this parallel world, came in the 1950s but which we are only seeing now.

To say more than this would ruin the story, as there are two mighty coups of revelation delivered about a quarter and halfway through the book, which resonate through the rest of the story and are quite impossible to free from your mind. The impression I get, however, is that Ishiguro is less interested in the sci-fi aspect of this than in using it as an allegory for us all, the stunted limitations of many of our lives, and our blithe acceptance of our ultimate fate.

Although the book has much to say, occasionally - even for this Ishiguro-lover - the saying was a little too restrained, and I was left feeling I had missed something important - why were Tommy's temper tantrums relevant? What about this, or that, or the other, interminable description of a tiny unimportant incident? For that reason I would suggest that Never Let Me Go is not ideal for newcomers to Ishiguro's work, who should begin with The Remains of the Day. Nonetheless, here Ishiguro has delivered another reliably fine confection, perhaps without the pixel-perfect wondrousness of The Remains of the Day, or the mad beauty of The Unconsoled, but with more accessibility than any of his other books and, despite the unruffled surface, a cast iron certainty to perform open heart surgery on any reader who's got one to give.

First off, let's get this out of the way: this is NOT a book about the ethics of human cloning; nor is it (in any conventional sense) "Science Fiction". Not that there is anything wrong with Sci-Fi: I've read and enjoyed a lot of it over the years. However, this definitely isn't it - it has much more in common with Kafka than with Philip K. Dick.

Ishiguro's tale is both moving and sinister from the start, and gets increasingly so as it goes on. In a darkly dreamlike Parallel England, a self-styled "ex-student" at what initially seems to be a boarding school deep in the country is recounting (in a deliberately flat, almost Enid-Blytonesque style) the childhood experiences of herself and her best friends. However, Ishiguro makes it abundantly clear from the first couple of pages onwards that all of the "students" are destined for a sticky end: indeed, one of the main points of the book is that the students are fully aware of their eventual fate even from a young age. They understand this information on a factual level, and even make crude jokes about it, but they have never properly internalised the full implications. For this reason among others, they passively accept the inhuman horror that awaits them.

For me, Ishiguro clearly intends the book as a sort of dream-parable to say various things about the human condition in general. Firstly, if we grow up with a horror (nuclear weapons, say, or Third World poverty - Ishiguro silently invites the reader to make his or her own list), then human nature is to take it for granted as an immutable Fact of Life and just accept it. The eventual fate of the Hailsham "students" is one that no sane person could possibly endorse: and that's exactly the point. (There's no "Ethics of Cloning" debate here - it's surely an open and shut case - and Ishiguro deliberately leaves the science of what is going on very sketchy.)

Many aspects of Kathy's tale are true for all of us. Like her contemporaries at Hailsham, we all know that we will inevitably die one day, and nothing - not True Love, High Art or whatever - will make one blind bit of difference. What, then, is the point of it all? Ishiguro's answer is initially a surprising one: "the little things" - the small change of human friendships and kindnesses; a favourite T-shirt; a "special" song off a second-hand cassette. This is what ultimately makes Kathy's tale so heartbreaking, and what makes the book ring so true emotionally.

At a key point in her childhood, Kathy describes a chilling realisation about one of the teachers or "guardians" as being like "seeing something strange and unexpected in the corner of a mirror you walk past every day" (I don't have the book to hand at present, so apologies if this isn't quite word-for-word.) This could well stand as a superscription to all of Ishiguro's fiction from "A Pale View of Hills" onwards, but is particularly appropriate as regards this unique and extremely unsettling book.