Bingo: “N”
**SPOILERS, Don’t proceed if you don’t want to learn the “twist.”
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is an odd book. It tells the story of Kathy, the protagonist, and her two friends, Ruth and Tommy, whom she lives with in a residential school called Hailsham. Hailsham is a place for students like them to grow up, be educated, and put their hearts into artwork, poetry, and other activities. These students are not your typical learners, however. They are clones who are being raised to be organ donors to cure disease in the non-clone population. Once they grow older, they first graduate to being “carers” for other donors, until they receive notice that it is their time to be a donor. Donors “complete”–die–after a certain amount of donations.
Three quarters of the book focuses on Kathy’s time at Hailsham and then another facility called the Cottages. The rest of the book follows her as she becomes a carer, eventually caring for both Ruth and Tommy as they move into the donor phase. The book focuses primarily on the relationships among the students, including love entanglements among Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy. Along the way, the reader learns bit by bit about their situation. Initially we don’t know they are clones; it takes a while to understand what’s going on. There are questions where they came from–who are their “models” for replication–the meaning behind the art the guardians have them create and display, the role of carers, and a mysterious rumor about how students in love can have their service delayed by three years.
The cloning “hook” isn’t as present as you would think. It forms the background of the story, but no information is ever given how exactly it works. The characters essentially have no past or future, so following them is a bit untethered to anything besides each other. The logistics of how and why they become carers, and particularly how the organ donations work is unclear. The book talks of multiple donations before the donors die, but how much can be donated in one person? Maybe a kidney and a piece of the liver, but what else is there to harvest without killing the clones? Are the clones built differently than their original models, where parts like a heart can be taken and the donor still live on to complete more donations? I don’t mean to be pedantic, but there was so little information about this process that questions kept coming up.
Not surprisingly, a theme throughout the book is what makes us human. The populace at large is afraid and even revulsed by the clones, often seeing them as subhuman. Hailsham and the Cottages are places where the clones can grow up safe, respected, and humanized, which is not common in the world they live in. Clones are often brought up in degradation and cruelty; the characters in this book have been given an opportunity to live with dignity before their “service.”
There is nothing science fiction-y about this book. The world is sketched in vague terms sometimes, and no explanation is really offered how things came to this state of affairs. I would say I read the book with interest, but in the end its effect on me was light. The relationships didn’t seem deep, although Ishiguro was undoubtedly going for depth, and the ending wasn’t terribly affecting.