Book Review: Never Let Me Go

Book #78

“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.” — Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

SPOILER WARNING. I know I don’t put spoilers in my reviews, because I get infuriated when I read them in others’. But I cannot discuss my thoughts on this book without completely spoiling it. You have been warned. If you want to know what I think but don’t want to be spoiled, read ONLY the first paragraph.

This book made me think a lot, both about what its strengths and weaknesses are, as well as the subject matter itself. So before I dive into what I thought, I want to say I really, really loved it. I thought the story was doing in a truly original way and the result is heartbreaking.

However, this doesn’t mean that I didn’t have lots of issues with the book. I think one of the reasons I want to talk about this book in such detail is because I loved it so thoroughly, that it really would have been close to being untouchable had a few alterations been made. One of the things that distracted me slightly was Ishiguro’s style. If I hadn’t read The Remains of the Day first (and so recently), it wouldn’t have been a problem, but the narrator’s voice in both is so similar it borders on identical. I understand that each author has a signature style, but the characters are very different and I felt like that should’ve been reflected a little more in the first person narrative — or else he could’ve chosen to do it in third person. The voice worked better for Stevens, the butler in The Remains of the Day, than for Kathy. I would’ve liked a little more of her emotional responses to seep through, even if it were only as an afterthought rather than the main focus.

Before I keep going, I should probably outline the plot, although if you’ve read this far hopefully you’ve already read the book. So we follow the lives of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy as they realise they were test tube babies grown to become organ donors, who “complete”, generally, after their fourth donation. The story is told from Kathy’s perspective, but it involves all three of them almost equally.

One issue I had was — why don’t the clones even think about rebelling? They may be reasons, but Ishiguro doesn’t even elude to them, let alone explain them away. What is it that keeps them on the ‘straight and narrow’, so to speak? Why don’t they run away? This first crossed my mind when they were at the cottages, but especially after Ruth had ‘completed’ (God, the first time I read the word completed it nearly broke my heart. Somehow it’s worse than ‘died’) and Tommy and Kathy H had gone to see if they could get a ‘deferral’ and found out they couldn’t. I wondered if this was because it was obvious that they were clones, but after they went into the art gallery, it was clear that that wasn’t the case.

And if running away wasn’t an option, why didn’t they purposefully trash their bodies? We’re told that they have all those lectures on how smoking is very bad, etc — did none of them even try it? It doesn’t matter to the me whether it’s Kathy, Ruth or Tommy — it could’ve been used as an anecdote to explain why more of them didn’t chose to abuse their bodies as a way out. After all, a bad liver is not one that can be used for a transplant, ditto lungs, kidneys etc. I understand that because they’re kept in the dark about certain things, their thought process when it comes to issues with donations and their lives are limited, but it’s also clear they are not unintelligent, so they should have been able to derive it for themselves. Smoking ruins my organs, therefore if I smoke, maybe they can’t use my organs. In the same line of thought, what about suicide? Clearly they can die. This idea seems to have crossed Ishiguro’s mind earlier in the novel, with the electric fence, but it’s not explored at all. Wouldn’t it be preferable to kill yourself rather than suffer through multiple surgeries? If the clone really wanted to donate their organs, they could even find a death that wouldn’t ruin their organs.

Another thing I was incredibly curious about is what is the order of the donations? It’s mentioned in passing that there is a preferred order that wouldn’t make them complete as fast, and that around their third or fourth donation they would complete. Is the fourth the heart? Are they hooked on machines for the rest of their organs? This is kind of hinted at when Tommy’s fourth is approaching, but again is never properly explored or explained. Of all the points I’ve raised I’m willing to concede this one, because it would have made the novel more graphic, less ethereal and not knowing does utilize  the reader’s imagination. 

Yet another thing that made me wonder is this: when they were at the cottages, Kathy says that the clones ask to be a carer themselves, thus triggering their own demise, so to speak. How long are they allowed to put it off? What are the conditions? For the matter, why do some remain carers so long? And so on, and so forth.

I think that covers most of the specifics that sparked my curiosity. As for my general thoughts for reading the book: I’m glad I didn’t know what it was about. I thought for so long that Hailsham was an average boarding school in the south of England (though of course, it was obvious that there was something slightly ominous). I also, for ages, thought that her clients were people recieving organs, not donating them, and that as a carer she was a kind of house nurse. This misconception made my heart break all the more for them, as I had been thinking about them as average children/young adults, not as sentient clones. I’m a hundred percent sure this was deliberate on Ishiguro’s part, and this was a particularly powerful tool.

All in all, this is a gorgeous book more than worth anyone’s time, but I think it would’ve benefited from more detail, with an extra fifty or so pages. That said, it remains one of the best books I’ve read this year, and its characters haunted me after I had put it down.