Ishiguro, Kasuo. Never Let Me Go. Vintage Canada, Toronto, 2005. F; 7/24.

This is a haunting tale which although it is technically science-fiction not only has characters that seemed real in my imagination but also carries – maybe because of those characters – sad and uncomfortable moral weight. I was reminded of Shirley Jackson’s story The Lottery, one of the most frightening allegories I’ve read. This couldn’t really be going on, and yet on some moral level it is.

(Plot alerts. If you want to read Never Let Me Go you probably should do that and read this review later if you feel like it.)  The plot situation is revealed slowly to be narrated as a flashback and to involve children in a superficially normal cheery English boarding school, called Hailsham.  As this revelation takes place it’s a bit like someone horribly disfigured uncovering one distorted part after another. I wondered how far this was going to go.

Well we discover gradually, as do the children, that all of them are human clones and have been propagated to provide organ transplants for members of the “other” world.

Protagonist Kathie has two close friends Ruth and Tommy and is part of a clique group at Hailsham. In the early narrative she describes herself as a “carer” for “donors”. Teachers at the school are “guardians”. Ruth is clever and manipulates others into respecting her leadership. Tommy is a bit different from other boys and is the butt of practical pranks to the point where he throws tantrums. In the school artwork is encouraged and the best of that artwork is taken away by Madame, a mysterious figure from outside. Kathy obtains a tape of a fictional singer Judy Bridgewater one of whose songs is the book title. Although Kathy knows the title and the lyrics are about romantic love, she feels them as a more individual personal message. The tape disappears.

At around the age of 16 the kids from the school “graduate” to Cottages where they meet older teenagers who haven’t had the privilege of attending Hailsham. It’s clear that donating vital organs is surgical and the consequences are never good and are eventually fatal. It’s rumoured and believed that romantic couples may be granted a reprieve of a few years from entering the phase as carers, then donors, then “completing”.

Our three principal characters go with an older cloned couple to a town in the West of England ostensibly to seek Ruth’s “possible”, the person from whom she is cloned. This doesn’t occur, but Tommy and Kathy find a copy of her tape in a secondhand store. During that trip after confronting someone in an art gallery Ruth gives an even darker interpretation of what they all are:

Art students, that’s what she thought we were. Do you think she’d have talked to us like that if she’d known what we really were? What do you think she’d have said if we’d asked her? “Excuse me, but do you think your friend was ever a clone model?” She’d have thrown us out. We know it, so we might as well just say it. If you want to look for possibles, if you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, that’s where you’ll find where we all came from.’

After Ruth’s early donations go badly she confesses to Kathy and Tommy that she has kept them apart, and gives them the address of Madame so they can go and try for the storied deferral for couples. They discover that the deferrals don’t exist, and in the end Tommy makes his fourth donation and dies. Kathy awaits the same fate.

What redeems this dreadful story to make it worth reading? The characters are lovely and evocative but slightly exaggerated types. Several times I found they strongly reminded me of people I’d known in school. Kathy is kind and noncommittal, Ruth is manipulative but eventually candid, Tommy is just a somewhat confused fundamentally nice guy. They are normal and human in their presentation but we are gently reminded by their very strong human credibility and something special about each of them being true-to-form of the obvious metaphor of inescapability of death.

So we reflect. Ishiguru said in an interview that he wanted to write a story about the nuclear age with a catastrophic ending, but decided what if it had been biology rather the nuclear physics that had leapt ahead? Hence these donors. The world didn’t go (hasn’t gone) that way. But the bigger almost allegorical metaphor is that the donors are humanity. So are we like them in any way?

Doomed for sure. Subject to an order we can’t control. Uncomfortable truths slowly dawning. Proceeding from one stage to another with things eventually getting worse. Imagining our troubled time can be delayed by finding love, but maybe not.

All that’s allegorical. But I’ve said before that the best fiction stands in its impact by poetic magic. Here it’s through real but somehow not-quite-human characters, hope, sorrow, and being charmed by it all even when it’s impossibly dreadful. I’m not sure this story escapes from the macabre enough for me to be fully enthralled. But at least it comes close and somehow the implausibility of the plot situation matches the slight exaggeration of the characters and I end up turning toward the author who made it all up.

I can’t easily separate content and style here. I hope if you read this novel and think about how it makes you feel it’ll be worth it, and I imagine if you think it is, like me you might not be quite sure why.