Cannonball #27: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
by Caroline
It’s official at this point that I’m going to become a raving Ishiguro fan, an espouser to strangers, and I will not be afraid to make a fool of myself about it. I love this man’s writing. The two books I read before this were strong, connective stories of people experiencing realizations in their recognizably ordinary lives. Never Let Me Go is as strong if not moreso, with an alternative-history-via-science-fiction twist that I feared would feel gimmicky. It absolutely does not.
Narrator Kathy opens in the present and offers her story in bits and pieces, framed in hindsight. She and her two closest friends at boarding school grew up in great secrecy and in unique circumstances. They are shaped by those circumstances in symbolic ways that come out more concretely than the average schoolday scars. Ishiguro’s use of this extended metaphor reminded me of another of my most favorite romantic science fictions: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (It also reminded me of the much more lightweight movie TiMER, which is worth checking out even though it’s a more traditional romantic comedy.)
In Eternal Sunshine, Michel Gondry showed us what could happen if we got to act out a prevalent, latent relationship fantasy: What if I could completely wipe out an entire memory of a person, to alleviate the unrelenting pain the memory causes me? Would the resulting holes in my mind outweigh the desired numbness?
Spoiler alert. Turn back now. But seriously, read this book.
Ishiguro offers Kathy and the man she loves the distant chance to win back a few good healthy years after being kept apart in their youth. On paper this sounds like a late-in-life cliche but Kathy and Tommy are barely 30 and unwitting participants in an imaginative Nuclear Age-spawned program to clone people and harvest their organs over time. Crueler still, each “donor” is kept alive and as healthy as possible through donations of two, three, or four vital organs, adding an increased element of mystery and unpredictability to any romantic feelings.
Kathy and Tommy feel the impending doom and pressing of the passage of time everyone else feels, but for them more than almost anyone it is literal. At 31, Kathy is an exception because she hasn’t yet been asked to make her first donation, and one of Ishiguro’s great unanswered questions in the book is why anyone is selected at any time. The unanswered questions are a great coup because they illustrate how seamlessly Ishiguro works this fantastical notion into his story.
It isn’t a novel about clones or organ donation. It isn’t a novel about the politics of postwar England or the science involved or even of the ethics of cloning. Instead, it is a classy, beautiful novel about a handful of special children and the adults they become, with the same feelings of missed opportunity and potential that everyone has. As in Remains of the Day and An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro’s first-person narrator reveals big meaty everythings in the course of her plain memories of school and what came after. She is a pleasure to learn about and relate to.
Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.
one response
Although I haven’t read any Ishiguro yet, I was intrigued by the movie trailer for this upcoming film. If the writing is fresh as you say, I will trek back to the library and check the book out, even though I passed it over in favor of Packer’s “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.”
Love your blog layout as well.