“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro

“Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn’t been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders.”

source for synopsis and Washington Post Review

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.

As a child, Kathy-now thirty-one years old-lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.

And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed-even comforted-by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham’s nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood-and about their lives now.

A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance-and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro’s finest work.

The Washington Post – Jonathan Yardley

What Madame thinks she sees will not be revealed for many pages, but it gets right to the essence of this quite wonderful novel, the best Ishiguro has written since the sublime The Remains of the Day. It is almost literally a novel about humanity: what constitutes it, what it means, how it can be honored or denied. These little children, and the adults they eventually become, are brought up to serve humanity in the most astonishing and selfless ways, and the humanity they achieve in so doing makes us realize that in a new world the word must be redefined. Ishiguro pulls the reader along to that understanding at a steady, insistent pace. If the guardians at Hailsham “timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information,” by the same token Ishiguro carefully and deliberately unfolds Hailsham’s secrets one by one, piece by piece, as if he were slowly peeling an artichoke.

My review
I was enticed by this gripping tale. It’s sort of like a mystery. You enter the world of Hailsham where the main characters grow up and it’s a world of mystery. Who they are. Where they came from. What’s their purpose. Why are they at this place. Where are their parents. It’s all a big mystery. With every chapter I turned to, another important bit of information would appear bringing me closer to the truth of the lives of these characters. I don’t want to give away the book, so I’m not going to give you the details of who they are and what purpose their lives serve. I’ll tell you why the book is called “Never Let Me Go.” Well part of the reason. It’s from a song on a casette the teenager Kathy had. The song is track 3 entitled “Never Let Me Go,” by Judy Bridgewater. Kathy liked to play that song often. Once she was pretending she was carrying a baby in her arms by using a pillow singing that song. She fantasized that she had a baby that she would never want to let go. Madame, another character in the book, sees her doing this in her dorm and starts crying. Why Madame cries and leaves is discovered at the end of the book. So I won’t give it away. The book began in the 1990s. Anyway I found the book somewhat frustrating. I didn’t understand why these special Hailsham students never rebelled against their fates. I didn’t understand why they so easily acquiesced to follow out the purpose of why they were born. I didn’t understand their resignation. After I read this book, I told myself I hope we never live in a world that allows for such inhumanity to exist. That statement is hard to understand if you don’t read the book. But I don’t want to live in a world where babies are born and considered subhuman and may not have souls and can’t lead normal lives. I didn’t find this book wholly believable because I thought if a world like that existed there would be some of these “special” babies that would grow up and rebel against their fates. I think that survival instinct would be strong unless they were genetically programmed to be so passive. I didn’t buy into the resignation of their fates. Anyway, I read most of this book today at the park. It was only 288 pages and quite easy reading. A nice break from Proust. hehe. I give this book 4 out of 5 stars because I enjoyed how the mystery unfolded. I don’t give it a five because I didn’t believe none of them would rebel their fates, unless they were genetically designed to be so passive. If that’s possible it wasn’t mentioned in the book. It’s a very interesting plot and after reading it I hoped that a world like that will never exist. I hope it never comes to that. Because I for one would fight against it. Anyway, I highly recommend this book.

Tags: book review, books, England, Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go