(Written by countezero for Worm's Sci Fi Haven, you can see more of his reviews here: www.wormsscifi.com/haven)
Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go did not win Britain's prestigious Booker prize this year, an honor the author claimed in 1989 for The Remains of the Day, but I suspect people will read this novel-a sublime and haunting account of innocence, injustice and social deconstruction-long after John Banville's The Sea, which did win, disappears from the collective social conscious.
To peak everyone's interest and to keep them from pulling their hair out, I'll come right to the point, which, as Sarah Kerr noted in her New York Times review, is impossible for a critic to dance around anyway. Never Let Me Go is about human cloning. More specifically, it is about a group of cloned children growing up in an English boarding school, where the truth about their biology is both the cause and effect of some very strange happenings, which ultimately make for one of the best contemporary novels I have read, a book that should not be overlooked and cannot be ignored.
Ishiguro, a student of Freud, likes to employ subtle psychology in his work. He likes his narrators too damaged to ever truly reveal themselves. What the reader learns, he or she learns mostly through the information the narrator chooses to withhold about their pasts and through the plainness of their reactions to the present. In this regard, Never Let Me Go is more of the same, in that what is most essential to novel's plot is barely mentioned, or concretely addressed. "Few writers dare to say so little of what they mean," wrote one critic, describing Ishiguro's style of approach. Because of this, any lengthy description of the novel's thorny arc of action would dull its effect for first-time readers.
What can safely be said is that Ishiguro, who is also a student of the English novel, knows all to well that the patches of literary ground where science and morality clash have always been arenas of brutal and bloody contests, with neither side interested in armistice. From Bacon's New Atlantis to Shelley's Frankenstein and Huxley's Brave New World, the tradition of tackling tough social issues through speculative fiction has always been a favorite pastime of English writers with highly refined sensibilities. I cannot imagine that Ishiguro doesn't understand the traditions he has inserted himself among by writing a boarding-school novel about the politics of scientific advancement. He knows exactly what he's doing. He's provoking us. And, for the most part, it works.
Told from the backward perspective of Kathy H, who is 31-years old when the story begins, we learn about the young lives of Tommy and Ruth, who are her two best friends, and the lives of all the children at a special school called Hailsham-a wonderful Dickensian name whose sinister perfection can only be fully understood at the novel's end. Most of the early-going is typical. Social cliques form, loyalties are established and tested, a juvenile form of sexuality begins to bloom-all of which is handled very skillfully by Ishiguro, whose powers of perception and whose ability to capture the reality of human interaction have never been more functional. Add to this picture a host of inklings, of hints and whispers, and you'll begin to understand how wonderfully terrifying and brutally banal the core of this novel is. The children have questions that aren't answered, certain subjects that are off-limits. They notice nobody ever leaves the grounds, that some people don't seem to know how to act around them and that everyone who is not a student seems to have access to a universal truth being kept from them. They notice all of this and they explain it all away.
For the reader, whose suspicion is apt to grow after a few chapters, the answers the children come up with don't satisfy. Are the teachers sheltering the children from harm, or are they fooling them before the slaughter? The answer is not a simple one. Some of the teachers burst into tears and leave the school under painful circumstances after they are apparently unable to continue working among the children. Others, who at first seem cold proponents of the children's dark fate, which is continually teased and hinted at but not immediately revealed, later turn out to be some of the strongest advocates for them.
And what of Kathy and the other cloned children? Are they sheep, or are they sheep with souls? Even most the teachers who've lived and worked among them are incapable of going beyond this either/or examination of the children, and because of this, there is no reckoning at the novel's end. There is only twisted discovery and gradual acceptance. This is one of Ishiguro's most brilliant tricks. He parcels out information to the reader at the same pace he does the children. The result is by the time we have the whole picture straight in our heads it is no where near as shocking as it initially would have been. Just as the children have done, we become accustomed to it (even Kathy, the novel's unreliable narrator, is incapable of judging the circumstances of her undoing and assigning any morality to it). So the epiphany, when it finally comes, fails to engineer any discernible effects on the plot or the characters at all. And in many ways, this is the novel's most sobering and realistic assertion. People, more often times than not, fail to act or act ineffectively. Dénouement is a slippery French word that describes the culmination of a fabricated plot; it does not describe or represent reality. Part of Ishiguro's genius is his ability to realize this and codify it as art, just as he does in the very last conversation Tommy has with Kathy, when it's made clear they both know more than they let on about the reality of their existence, but neither are capable or prepared to do anything about it.
"I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast," Tommy says. "And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. (They want to stay forever)...but in the end, we can't stay forever."
Thus, the novel ends the way it was always going to end-with a stoic resignation that hauntingly recalls the bleak sort of acceptance victims of the Holocaust exhibited as they stood patiently in line waiting to be gassed.
Or as another reviewer, quoting a snatch of some Schopenhauer, put it: "In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear."
The horror of Never Let Me Go is that the children of Hailsham know almost exactly what lies beyond the curtain and they continue to look and participate in the pageantry of life anyway. How human of them.
Five out of five
