“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro
It's been a long time since I picked up a book that hit me so hard as this one. It took me a while to really get hooked, but by the end I literally could not put it down.
Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.
Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.
The good thing about websites like Goodreads is that it allows you to look back on the exact dates you read a certain book. And this means I can find out exactly when I last read a book that left my mind racing and immediately took its place at the top of my favourite books.
And so I can say that the last time this happened, with Life After Life, was over four years ago. But now it's happened again with Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.
It's hard to put my finger on exactly how this novel gets its fingers into your mind. But I think it's largely to do with the way it tells its story. Because, rather than showing us the world the characters live in, Ishiguro instead shows us how the characters live in it. And through those experiences, the reader gets to slowly build an image of the world themselves. We're told the story through the memories of our narrator, Kathy. But while the truth about her life, in fact about her very existence, is bleakly traumatising, our view of it is normalised through the innocent acceptance of childhood. We don't realise how disturbing the characters' lives are until later in the book because they don't think about it that way. It's simply the way their life has always been.
Kathy's memories of her schooldays, particularly her relationships with her best friends, Ruth and Tommy, perfectly capture the feeling of that time in life when school is everything. When, to a greater or lesser extent, the rest of the world didn't register in our minds. A time when the important things in life were school events and the gossip of who was dating who, rather than the unpleasant truths that await us in adulthood.
But soon enough, we start to see elements of the truth. How they are not destined to make their own choices in life. How not everyone is happy with the situation. How the isolation is not simply the self-centred focus of the childish mind but a literal separation from the rest of the world.
It's not just a metaphor for how we feel in childhood, but an integral part of the story.
And to Kathy, of course, none of this is out of the ordinary. She doesn't omit these details from most of the story for any particular reason, but because there's no reason why she would. When we reminisce about our schooldays, do we include details about why we were in school? No, because that's not something we register as needing any explanation.
I will say it wasn't a story that grabbed my attention straight away. Don't get me wrong, I was engaged, but it wasn't until just past the halfway point, where it had become clear that the lives of these characters were not what we were expecting, that I couldn't put the book down.
And then the conclusion.
When I look back on it, it shouldn't work as well as it does. It's literally an exposition dump. But somehow, Ishiguro makes it work. Maybe it's because this scene filled us in on the world we've been looking at for so long without really seeing. Or maybe it's simply down to how good an author Ishiguro is.
Having finished Never Let Me Go, I find myself unable to pin down what it's ultimately about. Is it a metaphor for capitalism? Migrant labour? Racism? Classism? But I came to the depressing conclusion that the answer is probably all of them. Or, to be more precise, it's about society, which is inherently built on all of these things. And the reason it's impossible to define what this book is about is simply because there are far too many ways in which we are happy to use, manipulate, and exploit each other.
Never Let Me Go is a classic for all the right reasons. It slowly builds the world through the eyes of the characters, it allows the reader to make their own conclusions, and it ends with a message that I could not stop thinking about.
