Summary: Never Let Me Go

The GIST

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a 2005 novel that looks, for many pages, like a gentle memoir of an English boarding school, and turns out to be one of the most unsettling books of its century. It is Ishiguro's sixth novel, set in an alternative England of the 1990s, and it follows three friends, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, from their sheltered childhood at a school called Hailsham into an adulthood that was decided for them before they were born. The science in it is cloning, yet critics keep pointing out that genetic science is not really what the book is about. Ishiguro himself said he wanted to write about the sadness of the human condition and about some of literature's oldest questions: what it means to be human, what the soul is, and whether we should try to fulfil the purpose we were made for.

The book's reputation has only grown. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Time magazine named it the best novel of 2005. The Guardian later placed it fourth on its list of the best books of the 21st century and the New York Times placed it ninth on its own. Its author went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. What earns it that standing is a calm, trusting narrator who tells a terrible story as though it were an ordinary one.

The Story

The voice we hear is that of Kathy H., thirty-one years old, who has spent eleven years working as a carer. That is a much longer stretch than most carers manage, and she is quietly proud of it. Her job is to look after donors, to keep them calm and comfortable as they pass through their operations, and because she is good at it she has been allowed to choose some of the people she cares for. She chooses old friends from her schooldays. Now she has been told that her time as a carer is coming to an end, and so she begins to look back. Her narration drifts between the present and the past the way memory does, one recollection tugging the next into view.

Most of what she remembers is Hailsham, an elite boarding school in an old country house where the students grow up with almost no contact with the outside world. Their teachers are called guardians, and the head guardian is Miss Emily. Two things are drilled into the children. The first is health: they must avoid disease, eat properly, exercise and never smoke. The second is art. They are urged to paint, draw and make things, and they are told that what they create reveals who they are inside. The best pieces are carried away by a visitor known only as Madame, for what the students believe is a mysterious gallery. Nobody explains why. There is no talk of parents. A great deal is left unsaid, and the children fill the silence with rumour and speculation, as children do.

Kathy's memories are of the small, enormous dramas of childhood: friendships, cliques, slights, loyalties, things that mattered desperately at the time. Her closest friend is Ruth, bossy and magnetic, the kind of girl others orbit around, whose loyalty is real but often tangled up with self-interest. Then there is Tommy, a gentle boy who is left on the edges of school life, in part because he is hopeless at the art that Hailsham prizes so highly. Kathy watches him, worries about him, and understands him better than most. She is the observer of the three, the one who notices more than the others and says less.

One memory stands apart. Kathy owns a cassette tape she plays again and again, and one day, dancing alone to a song on it, "Baby, Never Let Me Go", she looks up to find Madame watching her, in tears. Kathy does not understand why, and the scene stays with her for years. Later the tape goes missing, and her friends joke that it has gone to Norfolk, the corner of England where, according to a half-believed Hailsham legend, everything that is lost eventually turns up. As the students grow into their teens, Tommy and Ruth become a couple, and Kathy, who is close to both, keeps her own feelings to herself.

Near the end of their time at the school, one guardian breaks ranks. Miss Lucy tells the students plainly that she can no longer hide the truth from them. There is no point in dreaming about future careers. They are clones, each copied from someone in the outside world, and they were created so that, once they are adults, their vital organs can be given to other people. Their futures are fixed. Miss Lucy is removed from Hailsham soon afterwards. The strange thing, and Ishiguro's most disturbing touch, is how little the announcement changes. The students have in some sense always known. They were told, but never in a way that let them truly understand, and they carry on.

At sixteen they move to the Cottages, a kind of halfway house where they have their first real brushes with the wider world. After their seclusion that world is intimidating, and they are awkward in it. From the Cottages each of them will eventually leave to train as a carer or, if they prefer, to begin donating. Meanwhile they wonder about their originals, the people they were copied from, whom they call possibles. When another student reports seeing a woman in Norfolk who might be Ruth's possible, a small group sets off to find her. On the journey they talk over a rumour that has been going around: that a couple who can show they are truly in love may be granted a deferral, a few extra years together before the donations begin.

The Norfolk trip is one of the saddest stretches of the book. They do find the woman, but the likeness turns out to be only skin deep. One reviewer describes the outing as something like a search for a mother, for a story of where they came from, and its failure leaves them all deflated, with the sense that there is nobody out there for them. The same day, Tommy tells Kathy he wants to find a replacement for her lost tape, and the two of them go hunting through the local shops for it together. He confesses what he feels for her, and he shares a theory. A guardian once said that the students' art reveals their souls, so perhaps Madame's gallery exists to tell which couples are really in love and deserve a deferral. Tommy, who never made any art worth collecting, fears he has already missed his chance.

When Ruth learns about the tape and about Tommy's theory, she strikes out with a spiteful remark designed to keep the two apart, telling Kathy that Tommy would never want her even if he were free. Not long after, Kathy puts in her application to become a carer and leaves. She will not see Ruth or Tommy again for ten years.

Those years are filled with the lonely work of sitting beside donors and watching the people in her care complete, the word this world uses for what happens to a donor, usually after the fourth donation. Then Kathy hears that Ruth's first donation has gone badly, and she asks to become her carer. The three friends are drawn back together, older and worn down. Ruth, full of remorse for having stood between Kathy and Tommy, has something to give them: Madame's address, and her urging that they go and ask for the deferral they once only whispered about. Whether love can buy time, and what the gallery was really for, are the questions the last part of the novel answers.

What It's Really About

On its surface this is a novel about cloning, and it does ask the question that the science raises: if the students love, laugh, quarrel, make art and grieve exactly as we do, what could justify treating them as spare parts? Ishiguro goes out of his way to show their pettiness and jealousy as well as their tenderness, because the ordinary flaws are what make them unmistakably human. A world that depends on them finds it easier not to look.

The deeper horror is in how normal it all feels. One reviewer calls the book an illustration of the banality of evil. The students never question who decided their place in life. Soft words do much of the work: donors do not die, they complete, and the children are students, never clones. Everything cruel lies beneath a surface kept smooth by manners and routine. Kathy even counts herself lucky, since Hailsham was kinder than the places where other clones are raised. The horror writer Ramsey Campbell called the story horrifying precisely because its narrator does not think it is. Readers often ask why the characters do not run or fight. The book's unnerving answer is that the idea has been drained out of them, and that we come to believe it too.

Many critics read it finally as a parable about mortality. The students tell each other small comforting stories to hold off the truth about what lies ahead, and so do we. We have all been told we will die, and few of us have really taken it in. The rumour of a deferral is the hope everyone clings to, the belief that love or talent might earn a little more time. Against that, Ishiguro sets what his characters actually have: friendship that stands in for family, a first love, and memory. Kathy's nostalgia for Hailsham is her way of holding on to people and places slipping away from her, and it is what makes her voice so moving.

It is also a coming-of-age story, an extreme version of the passage every child makes out of the protected innocence that adults build around them. And it is a book about care, in every sense, including the uneasy question of whether Kathy's devotion to her work helps her friends or simply keeps the system running without complaint.

Who Should Read It

Read it if you love quiet, character-driven fiction that leaves a mark long after you finish, and if you would rather be unsettled by a calm voice than by spectacle. It will reward readers of dystopian novels such as Brave New World who want something more intimate, book clubs looking for a story that opens up arguments about ethics, science and class, and anyone drawn to novels about friendship, first love and the way memory shapes a life. Readers who need action, rebellion or tidy explanations of how this world works may find its restraint frustrating. Those willing to listen closely to Kathy will find it very hard to forget her.