Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

With summer finally here, I guess it's time to bust out some books and start reading. When I sat down to dinner on the last day of school with my family, I asked for a few book recommendations. And, obviously, I received some books that I immediately rejected--Art of War, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (which, I will admit, I have just finished reading), and the like--in other words, my parents aren't exactly the people to ask for reading suggestions. On the other hand, my sister had just picked out Ishiguro's Remains of the Day (which I had read a couple months earlier--that book is amazing) and she suggested half-heartedly, after flipping to the back of the book for a list of titles, Never Let Me Go, another book by this wonderful Kasuo Ishiguro. (:D)

So, I checked out this book. It took a while for me to get a grip on it. And since it's Ishiguro's style for his narrators to postpone a full telling of their place in the world, all we know early on is that we don't know what's going on... All we have are inklings. The 31-year-old narrator, Kathy H., announces on the first page that she has worked for 11 years as a ''carer.'' The people she assists at work are ''donors'' at a recovery center. But Kathy is our guide on this journey, and instead of telling of her life in the present (which would be ''England, late 1990's'') she likes to wander back to years spent with her closest friends, Ruth and Tommy, at boarding school--a fabled place in the countryside with the name of Hailsham. Kathy and her classmates were taught to think of themselves as lucky for having gone to Hailsham. It was the best, the most privileged of schools. The school was run by ''guardians''. Both protective and strangly distant, these guardians prevent students from leaving campus, have them screened each week by a doctor, and keep them busy with art projects that seem essential to their development, as if a child's creative output might hold a clue to her fate. ''Thinking back now,'' Kathy says, ''I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves--about who we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside--but hadn't yet understood what any of it meant.''

We're led to see that the students are clones, kept in isolation at a special school, pampered and sheltered and encouraged to feel like children for as long as possible. The theme of cloning allows Ishiguro to push ideas he's created in earlier writing about memory and individuality; Hailsham's seclusion allows for room for his fascination with loyalty and friendship. The voice for Kathy is a feat of imaginative sympathy and technique. He works out ways of showing her naivete, her responsibility as interpreter of what she sees, but also her deductive wit, sensitivity to pain and need for affection.

Ishiguro shows how Hailsham students, cut off from outside contact, manage to fill in their world with taboos, jokes, fantasies, paranoid rumors of the unknown and unusual. The eeriest feature of this strange world is how familiar it feels. Never Let Me Go offers many questions such as: what is the value of a life? Do we have souls? And how do we assess who deserves to live and who deserves to die? What if our lives are already mapped out for us from birth? Instead of having dreams of being a doctor, lawyer, engineer, writer, how would you feel if you found out that your only purpose in life is to sacrifice yourself for the greater good of mankind?

With these questions in mind, and the way Ishiguro creates the small sense of safety through his gentle narrator, the end is quite heart-wrenching and unsatisfying. However beautifully written, and wonderfully crafted the ending is, there seems to be an unanswered inquiry that Ishiguro leaves us with when we are left alone with Kathy, back in the present and with much in the future waiting for her.

So, to end on a happier note, I would recommend this book. There are many adult themes discussed in the book, and the movie adaptation (which my sister watched and gave wonderful reviews for) is rated R, probably for these reasons (I haven't seen it, so I don't really know.) Here is the trailer for the 2010 Never Let Me Go movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXiRZhDEo8A. So, if the book recommendations that you are looking for haven't been the most satisfactory, I hope this one helped.

So it goes, Revusters! :D