Never Let Me Go (2005)

Excerpt from my original GR review (Feb 2009):
- Engaging fantastical story. The soullessness is affecting. Kathy's narration, sad, haunting and totally captivating. I felt much sympathy for the students. Quick pace read, not like anything I've read before. I'll read more Ishiguro. [note: and I did read more; I'll very likely re-read this book as well] ( )

The only reason this is getting two stars instead of one is that it is well-written, from a technical standpoint, and it kept my attention (if only in the way that I couldn't wait to get it over with rather than putting it down and not bothering to pick it up again). I found the characters very difficult to care about, essentially because they exist and behave in complete service to the literariness of the novel. There are three main characters: Kath, the narrator, who is somewhat of an amorphous nothing, personality-wise; Ruth, a classic toxic female friend, whose manipulations I had very little patience for; and Tommy, the only character I found both unique and sympathetic.

I took issue with many things that came and went, but aside from the characters, the thing that was prevalent throughout (and I will try to avoid direct spoilers) was that I could not believe these people would let this be done to them, or would willingly participate in the system of it. Not in the aghast way of being shocked at some strange human behaviour; I mean that the author utterly failed to convince me that these people had any reason for accepting what they were expected to do and endure and be. Somehow I don't think his intention was that the characters be seen as less than human, but that's exactly what they became to me, since one would have to sever some very basic elements of a character's humanity for this to be acceptable (either to the characters or the reader). This can be done either within the text itself to make it believable to the reader, or the author can simply pretend people aren't the way people are in order to say what he wants to say, and I believe Ishiguro did the latter.

Perhaps this is because I'm missing something from the first part of the book, which takes place at Hailsham. Kath tells us about having a sense of always knowing what its students were meant for, that it was revealed gradually to them in a sort of oblique manner so that when the truth is told to them point-blank it's rather anticlimactic. I think this is meant to pass as an indoctrination, but it simply doesn't work. While the Hailsham students' upbringings have an element of strangeness to them, the fact is that they are still growing up with a certain western sensibility that encompasses individuality and autonomy and all the things that make a person not feel like they're, you know, oppressed. In the end, Hailsham is a quirky boarding school, and if I was meant to be especially disturbed by it, it failed spectacularly.

In less of a fundamental disagreement with the premise and more a narrative note, I quickly lost patience with the way the story skips around. It often intentionally gets ahead of itself and then goes back to explain past events, which I have no problem with in principle but could get so convoluted here that a few times, I literally thought the author had mixed up his timeline. ( )

This book was so quietly horrifying that you didn't realize how scary it was until it was all over. Excellent read. ( )

If you think deciding what is moral or right is easy, read this novel and think again. What if you could save total populations from death by premature disease, from death by cancer, from birth defects and heart conditions. Would you do that? Of course. Would you do that if it required the extinction of another group of people? What if you could classify those people as not people at all? What if you could define the having of a soul and decide they do not have one?

Ishiguro tackles this issue without any preaching or proselytizing. He just lays out a story about three individuals, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, who grow up in a school called Hailsham; a group of children who have a predetermined future and a purpose they did not choose and of which they have no control. He delves into the lives of three young people who fail to fully understand how hopeless their future truly is and who fail to grasp how fully they stand outside the world they occupy. What they feel and think about their situation as it unfolds is both predictable and strangely unpredictable. I kept wanting them to run away, to escape, to reject this unfair fate, but in the end they were as tied to the society they lived in as those who would benefit were. This story ripped at my insides and made me wish to scream and flail and pitch the same tantrums for which Tommy was so markedly known, because it seemed the greatest horror here was that “normal” people could condemn these children to unbelievable suffering and anguish by simply labeling them as “different”, as inhuman.

Like all good horror tales, the most frightening aspect of this tale is its possibility. I cannot fear anything that I know cannot happen. This sends shivers because it mirrors our past and envisions our future. We have, dating back to the beginning of our recorded history, evidence that we can dehumanize others and use them for our own ends. The technology depicted here just serves as another way to reach that same end.

I finished this book collapsed in tears. I was crying for Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, for Miss Emily and Madam, who were helpless to change things, and for everyone whose dreams are futile and squashed before they have wings to fly.

( )

This book was assigned reading for my Gender in Literature class in college. It's a very bizarre book, but once you realize what is happening, your heart will ache for these characters. These boys and girls know from the beginning what their lives will be like, and they have no way to escape that fate. This really is a tragically disturbing, yet wonderful book. ( )