Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

Read Oct 2017

The story is set in England, in a remote ‘boarding school’ called Hailsham. Its resident students live there from infant to adulthood.

It takes some reading to realize that the protagonist is not living in a typical English boarding school but a place that nurtures organ donors who are created as clones from human 'possibles'.

The fair amount of the story is about the sexual awakening of these organ donors and their sexual exploits. The reader is given a hint that these students are special because they will not have babies despite their sexual permissiveness. 

The main character, Kathy makes friends with Tommy and Ruth. She is close with Tommy, a boy with inferior complex and has trouble controlling his temper. Only Kathy is able to tame him. Ruth is the other friend, domineering, full of lies and manipulative. Kathy and Ruth has a love hate relationship because of Ruth’s character. Ruth and Tommy becomes a couple, leaving Kathy out of their special relationship.

Ruth becomes the first of the 2 friends to have her organs harvested and Kathy cares for her as a professional carer, a job she undertaks before she becomes an organ donor herself. As Ruth’s life begins to ebb, Ruth brings Tommy and Kathy together because she knew they like each other. The two becomes a couple after Ruth is ‘completed’ , an euphemism for death.

Tommy and Kathy wants to buy time to be together. They heard that a certain Madame who used to visit their school holds the power to let them delay their mission of organ donation if they could proof their love for each other. A long search for Madame ensued but when they found her, they realise that it is all hearsay. Both Tommy and Kathy has lost ten good years  and time for them is running out.

Tommy had his organs harvested four times before he 'completes'. In love, he asks that Kathy leave after his last donation because he doesn’t wish to see him ‘completed’.

At the end of the book, we see Kathy meeting her own fate as organ donor. Her days as carer is over and now it is her turn to fulfill her mission.

This mood of this book is dark but at times humorous. The sexual exploits were well executed and does not bother on crassness. The time ‘Never Let Me Go’ is  supposed to be a song that Kathy loves. When the cassette with this song was lost, Tommy and Kathy found another cassette in Norfolk, the place where ‘all lost things go’. It was a friendship that borders on the edge of romance but is constantly interrupted by Ruth. I wouldn’t exactly call this a science fiction but more of a dystopian science fiction. It also allows the reader to think about the ethics of clones for organ transplant but leaves it to the reader to figure out if it is morally right.