Never let me go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

‘Never let me go’ was my second Ishiguro and followed only a few months the reading of ‘The remains of the day’. Far from aspiring any sort of comparison between both novels, the remark comes first to ascertain what any reader of more than one of his works is capable of finding out, i.e., that the writer is great at establishing atmosphere and even greater at creating powerful narrators and embroidered narratives. Both novels have first-person narrators and are mainly based on recollections, therefore memories are expected to be manipulated and revelations disclosed in small drops. But there cease all similarities. ‘Never let me go’ is youthful in its tone and has a mysterious almost-gothic mood, shyly flirtatious with science-fiction, although the details wanted by the admirers of the genre are rather scarce, to avoid typing nonexistent. In a manner ‘Robinson Crusoe’, ‘Moby Dick’ and other autobiographical bildungsromans had done before it, the novel starts with the statement of one’s name, age and occupation: ‘My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years.’ Thus we are introduced to Kathy’s story, one that will take the reader way back into her childhood in a boarding-school, her young-adult days, and her latest years as a carer.

Kathy’s occupation is one of the many keys Ishiguro provides the reader with to disclose the unsettling narrative being told. The novel is divided in three parts, each one encompassing a specific time and place of Kathy’s life. First, and most important, at Hailsham, a school for special children secluded in the English countryside. Second, in the Cottages, where most students would go once they had graduated at Hailsham, a residence unwatched by guardians. And finally, at hospitals and recovery clinics around England. Besides Kathy, who tells the story, there are two other main characters, Ruth and Tommy, friends with Kath and a couple during most of the novel. Unfortunately, the major surprise in the plot is something rather predictable for us 21st century readers with a large baggage of science-fiction films on our backs. And as for myself, who am not fond of such debates as to the implications of cloning humans for the only purpose of having them donate organs, I found the discussion rather elegantly established – without ever mentioning the word ‘cloning’, for instance. Interestingly enough, there is no sense of rebellion in Hailsham students, no attempt to evade their fates. The novel deals with how one copes with one’s lot, and accepts that, at some point, one is to face donations until one’s completion. Beautifully idyllic and of great readability, ‘Never let me go’ is, most of all, a careful plunge into the heart of youth, with as many tension and anguish as any other literary effort to unveil and expose the human soul, whether it had been issued in laboratories or not.