“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro

“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro is one of those books that never lets you forget, to paraphrase the opinion of our wonderful book reviewer Jen Mann. We’ve just read her words and now we’re on our way to the library to request a copy – see if you feel the same way about this extraordinary book.

Occasionally you read a book that resonates within you immediately and you just know that it’s going to do that forever. Ishiguro’s Remains of The Day was such a book and more so is Never Let Me Go*.

The power of this book is in its raw, almost surreal, approach to friendships, comfort and love in the broader context of scientific culpability. How far is too far to save someone? Which someone is worth saving and how dare anyone decide?

The setting is present day in a slightly skewed version of the world. An English boarding school called Hailsham is the touchstone for a group of children who grow up there and are sent out too young and vulnerable into a world that will use them.We are initially unsure of why they seem so different but we immediately sense that they are. A great deal of our information seems intuited, as it is for these children as well.

There are no parents. There are only guardians and peers. They grow up to fill a specifically heart-wrenching role that we can only pray will never be reality. But it their reality, and the grace with which they accept it is crushing.How can their lives be reasonable to them?Because they know nothing else.

The entire book reminded me of a scene in H.G. Well’s Time Machine where the simple innocents are lead happily to their death at the hands of the very people who have lovingly bred them.

As we watch the story at Hailsham unfold, we see the author play boarding-school angst perfectly. We feel with them. We watch as these children become adults but never really mature. They carry their unanswered questions with them and when we see them as adults fulfilling their destiny, we just want them to run away. They don’t. It never even occurs to them and we are left despairing for the scientific world that has created and destroyed them.

Ishiguro’s stories evoke many feelings within us. Loss, despair, hope, trust and mistrust – all simultaneously. While some feelings are with specific response to his plot, some just float in the air around you. He reminds you of your own desires. Your own cravings and fears both as an adult and as a child. He manifests the intangible and it leaves you feeling winded.

* The title comes from a fictional singer’s album in the book but in our world there are two wonderful versions of Never Let Me Go by respectively Dinah Washington and Tierney Sutton.