Never Let Me Go

I surprised myself when I picked up Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro to take on a recent trip. It was a great choice. I read it in a day and digested it in the days that followed. It's a "chewy" book - a startling, sad tale that makes you think of times yet to play out for humankind. The tale speaks of an alternate world in which questionable, ethical decisions have been made that affect thousands of young people in England. The book holds its own on the bookshelf of great futuristic books such as 1984 and Brave New World.  Newsweek called it the best book of the decade. It is the most recently published book on the Time 100 list.

Never Let Me Go is a complex tale and Ishiguro is a master of weaving multiple time periods into a cogent whole. We follow Kathy H., a 31 year old "carer", as she drives around the countryside visiting her clients and reminiscing about her life and her friends and muses on the special fate that she and her friends were prepared for.

Everything else that I say about the book is going to be a spoiler, so if you have not read it, please do so - it is literally a great book.

**SPOILERS FOLLOW***

You can read a good plot summary and some related material on Book Drum. Below is my commentary on the book.

Kathy H. and her friends are clones who are raised solely to provide organs for "real" humans with cancer. The book looks at the issue of cloning humans as a way to grow organs, just as one would grow crops. Clones in this world are typically raised in warehouse-like settings, but Kathy H. and her friends have had better treatment at a boarding school that teaches them the arts and encourages them to showcase their creative talents. Ishiguro lets the story about the group of friends and their teachers play out, and is not overly-focused on the ethical issues surrounding cloning until the end of the book where he shares a few details of the program. Ishiguro instead looks at the sorrow of the cloned beings who give their lives in service and the ways in which they come to terms with their limited lives.

It is indeed a sad book. The student/protagonists have no parents and no friends outside of their community. Adults in their lives, even those championing them, find them repulsive. Once the students are in their early twenties, they become carers who help other slightly older clones recover from a series of surgeries to remove organs. They watch these same people die at a young age once their organs are harvested. We watch Kathy H. care for her best friend, Ruth, and her lover, Tommy, as they proceed along their fated paths.

Is there a way out? In their 2-3 years of freedom after school, the students learn of others before them who have disappeared into the world of humans and thus avoided the role of carer and donor. Kathy H. and her friends, now adults, whisper about this, but they never consider running themselves. Ishiguro leaves us to infer that it would be out of character for them to go. They are deep into their own social world and they have been systematically indoctrinated into their roles, like kidnapped children, who are sympathetic to and obedient to their kidnappers.

What Kathy H. and Tommy attempt to get instead is a stay of leave. They request a few extra years time to spend together before they meet their fates. However, there is no room in the clone organ-harvest system for this kind of leeway. It is during this part of the tale that Ishiguro gives us the few details about the cloning program that he is willing to share as he wraps up a lot of small plot details.

Ishiguro said in an interview that he used the cloning theme as a medium to explore the relationships of a group of young people who were fated to die young. His concern was the relationships of the characters not the scientific or sociological underpinnings of cloning.

And so we are left hanging with questions about the history, politics and ethics of cloning. We do not know to what degree the clones were genetically modified. Were they created as a new species? Who were they cloned from and how were those people selected? Did those who were cloned belong to wealthy families who want to have organs available for their use should they need them? We are also not given details about the warehousing of clone children or of the political struggle to give them better lives. What is the public debate? How does the public manage to ignore the beings who are raised to be donors?

I miss these details, but it is not a lesser book without them. The intimate look at Kathy H, Ruth and Tommy is all the story we need. The writing is superb, the story rich and haunting. It has what feels like a timeless appeal even though, like 1984, it's alternate view of the future is unlikely to play out.