Never Let Me Go
March 13th, 2006
I read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go last week. Margaret Atwood's review in Slate sums it up nicely:
[...]
Ishiguro likes to experiment with literary hybrids, to hijack popular forms for his own ends, and to set his novels against tenebrous historical backdrops; thus When We Were Orphans mixes the Boys' Own Adventure with the '30s detective story while taking a whole new slice out of World War II. An Ishiguro novel is never about what it pretends to pretend to be about, and Never Let Me Go is true to form. You might think of it as the Enid Blyton schoolgirl story crossed with Blade Runner, and perhaps also with John Wyndham's shunned-children classic, The Chrysalids: The children in it, like those in Never Let Me Go, give other people the creeps.
[...]
Although Ishiguro employs a distinctly science fictional plot device, he doesn't feel any obligation to show the fruits of his worldbuilding: he leaves unexplored the question of how readily society accepted the cost the scientific advances he stipulates, he completely fails to describe how the system of "donations" works, and he allows the question of whether other schools had more problems with their "students" than Hailsham did to be left to one side. Much as I enjoyed the novel, I couldn't help but wish for a little more information about the society in which Kathy H lived. Come to that, I couldn't help but wonder whether there was an underground railroad of which the Hailsham students, being so thoroughly acclimated to the system, remained blissfully unaware. Indeed, every time I read one of Kathy H's accounts of the Hailsham graduates' encounters with outsiders, I wondered just how many small signs she was missing, how far she was misinterpreting people's reactions to them. Which was part of the fun, figuring out just what else Kathy was missing or misunderstanding or just plain blocking out in order to preserve her equanimity.
Despite this urge to probe the story as if it were a piece of hard science fiction, I was very taken with Ishiguro's work here. He's very good indeed at describing the all-but-hermetic environment in which Kathy and her lifelong friends Ruth and Tommy grow up, the claustrophobic world of the boarding school. Although Ishiguro reveals the primary secret that drives the plot well inside the first hundred pages, it's a sign of how effectively he draws the reader into the personal lives of his characters that I willingly spent the next couple of hundred pages following Kathy's efforts to unlock all sorts of much less important secrets, even as I was wishing for a better view of the big picture.
Written by a different sort of author Never Let Me Go could have been the story of a plucky resistance movement, or a body-horror piece, or an account of a struggle by a small humanitarian group to bring about a change of policy in the face of a gruesome yet popular holocaust. Still, that's not the story Ishiguro wanted to tell, and more power to him for sticking to his focus on the personal, the small scale, the human. Highly recommended.
Incidentally, there's an MP3 of an interview with Ishiguro at Rick Kleffel's Agony Column which is well worth a listen.
