In the process of reading:
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
All children should believe they are special. But the students of
Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so
special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the
occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their
unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth
novel, Never Let Me Go, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the
students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going
on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and
the truth about these children on their own.
Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid,
measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham
alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one
phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective
mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest
in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic
women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact
narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in
a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe
restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work,
The Remains of the Day, only after closing the book do you absorb
the magnitude of what his characters endure. --Regina Marler
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On its surface, NEVER LET ME GO tells the story of three special
young people - Kathy H., Tommy D., and Ruth - all of whom meet as
students at an idyllic private school called Hailsham. Kathy H. is
the narrator, now 31 years old, telling her story in hindsight. She
recalls her student days at Hailsham fondly, filling her tale with
numerous minor anecdotes about the most mundane affairs that slowly
reveal the nature of the school and its students' place in the
world. (...) Ishiguro creates a convincing vocabulary, milieu, and
mythology for this setting: guardians, carers, donors, completing,
Exchanges, Sales, the Gallery, Norfolk, and an eerie sense of the
students having "been told and not told."
NEVER LET ME GO accomplishes the remarkable challenge of presenting
288 pages' worth of reading between the lines. Kathy, Ruth, and
Tommy are not the real main characters of this story, only the
visible ones. The real main characters are invisible, the ones who
have not only facilitated the use of cloning as a form of organ
farming, but who have created a conditioning environment in which
their victims accept their fate without question, as the natural
order of things. Kathy, Ruth, Tommy, and their ilk live among
normal people yet virtually never approach them, willing
segretating themselves from the rest of society as though they were
lepers. They live in Skinner boxes without boundaries, conditioned
to believe they exist only to sacrifice their lives for the
continued life of others. We never see the bioengineers or social
scientists who create and maintain this horrifying use of humanity.
Instead, they are represented (only on a limited scale) by
Hailsham's headmistress, Miss Emily, and the mysterious,
art-collecting Madame Marie-Claude.
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NEVER LET ME GO is a transcendent
novel, an astonishingly powerful work of literature. The pace is
slow and the details seem trivial, but patient readers will be
rewarded for their efforts with a thought-provoking exposition on
whose life is worth living and who, if anyone, has the right to set
the terms and conditions. Arendt contemplated the banality of evil
- Ishiguro warns us of the evils that lurk behind
banality.
