For the re-reading of this novel in 2006, click here.
Never Let Me Go is a book about clones. The offspring of prostitutes, addicts, and others in search of small compensation, the clones are commodities born, bred, and raised for harvesting. They have no more rights than animals who are tortured for cosmetics testing. But don't get upset: their lives are quite agreeable. They are well-schooled, and even encouraged to have healthy sex with one another (they can't reproduce, so that's not an issue). The school in which they're brought up occupies a lovely Great House, and their teachers, or "guardians," are companionable souls who excite, if anything, a suspicious lack of teenaged animus. The kids don't really understand their future, but they have no past, either. Theirs is a world of totalized Day Care.
The school is called "Hailsham." (As a lawyer, I can't overlook the fact that this is the name of a very prominent mid-century law lord in England, and I wonder if Mr Ishiguro meant to invoke the weight of judicial authority.) The reader will spend the entire first and second parts of the novel wondering just what Hailsham was. We learn early that it was a very special school, that not all of the kids in this universe of clones gets to attend it - very few, in fact. But we don't get the big picture until the novel is almost over, and when it comes, we're altered. The novel has been set up so that readers like me - and they may outnumber readers who know nothing about the book before they read it - think that Hailsham is a corrupt institution, something in need of of a rousing exposé. Who are the higher-ups behind it? We realize that we're in Kafka land. But where will the trial be held? We never find out, but by the time we realize that, it doesn't matter.
The three parts of the novel correspond to the three parts of a cloned commodity's life. First, there is Hailsham, the body double of a good English public school, where the clone is a "student." Then there is sort of halfway house, preparation for the real world, where the clone is a "veteran." Finally, there is the grim adult world for which the clone has been and for which it will be cut up for organs. It is divided between "donors" and "carers." You start out as the latter and move up to the former - with an alacrity that will surprise unempathetic souls.
There are two completely independent biomedical issues in this book, and they must be regarded as distinct. First, there is cloning itself. Mr Ishiguro rightly understands that clones are simply other people, regardless of their unusual genesis. The cloning process does not produce non-humans. It's amazing to me how thick people can be about this. Some folks even imagine that clones are multiplications of the self, allowing one person to occupy several bodies simultaneously - way kewl. There are others, apparently, who doubt that clones have souls, or whatever you want to call the core of human identity. When Mr Ishiguro first mentions these doubters, toward the end of the novel, we're outraged, because we've spent enough time with the clones to know that they're just like us. (It is to prove the doubters wrong that the severe-looking woman who is known to the students only as "Madame" shows up from time to time to collect the kids' best artwork, which she later puts on exhibition for the elite general public.) And then there is the commoditization of body parts. This is where the horror of Never Let Me Go comes from. The kids at Hailsham are all prospective organ donors. Some of them - the lucky ones - will "complete" after their third "donation"; that is, they will die after the third major organ has been taken from their bodies. The unlucky ones will survive brain death and go on to be fountains of transplants surveyed only by unseeing eyes: if you thought Terri Schiavo was in a pickle, you had no idea.
In other words, these children are being raised to be slaughtered. We can't imagine that, except as a blank horrible, because we've never known anyone in the position of a harvestee. The idea is so ghastly that it will be better when almost all readers know about this aspect of the book before going in, the way almost everybody knows that Oedipus turns out to have married his mother or that the boys in Lord of the Flies are marooned on an island without adult supervision. I'm not sure that I could have made it through the first part of Never Let Me Go if the destiny of its cast of young people had been a mystery. Knowing about it in advance allowed to prepare myself for a very bitter pill.
Like anybody else, I hoped, hoped, hoped that the narrator, Kathy H., would manage an escape from the system into which she had been born. Kathy begins the book with the information that she is thirty-one and a good carer, and this information provides useful assurance that nothing bad is going to happen in the earlier parts of the tale. For nearly half the length of the book, Kathy tells a series of intricately linked anecdotes, many of them preceded by backtracks and each of them casting a ray of light on her own and her fellow-students' developing grasp of their situation. The have been told as very young children that they will be organ donors when they grow up, but this doesn't compute, for the simple reason that death never computes with children. Children can't really believe that they're going to die. (They can't really imagine achieving adulthood, either.) In the anecdotes, however, Kathy and her friends are either on the verge of puberty or well into it. This is the time in life when the reality of death begins to sink in for everybody - although for most teenagers, I suspect, death remains vaguely evitable. By the end of Part One, the imaginative reader ought to have stopped fretting about the moment when the coin drops and Kathy sees the full horribleness of her situation. Why should Kathy be different from what you or I were when we were young? Death seems a long way off; now is for sex.
Kathy's world centers on her friends Ruth and Tommy. Ruth is bossy and imaginative, and Kathy is nothing less than grateful when Ruth takes her on to a secret guard "tasked" with preventing the abduction of a beloved teacher (or "guardian"), Miss Geraldine. The plot and its plotters are painstakingly inferred from chance circumstances, as imaginary plots always are.
It would be too easy to claim it was just Ruth who kept the secret guard going long after we'd naturally outgrown it. Sure enough, the guard was important to her. She'd known about the plot for much longer than the rest of us, and this gave her enormous authority; by hinting that the real evidence came from a time before people like me had joined - that there were things she'd yet to reveal even to us - she could justify almost any decision she'd made on behalf of the group. If she decided someone should be expelled, for example, and she sensed opposition, she'd just allude darkly to stuff she knew 'from before.' There's no question Ruth was keen to keep the whole thing going. But the truth was, those of us who'd grown close to her, we each played our part in preserving the fantasy and making it last for as long as possible.
It is easy to sustain minor fantasies while working harder and harder to maintain major fantasies, as several of the students do. This one's going to be a film star when he grow up, that one's going to run a shop. The darkest moments in Part I gather round the character of Miss Lucy, a briskly serious woman with a passion for her students' welfare that is hidden from them but not from us. It is Miss Lucy who tells the class one day that nobody is going to grow up to be a film star or run a shop. "Your lives are set out for you. You'll become adults, then before you're old, before you're even middle-aged, you'll start to donate your vital organs."
It's hard to say clearly what sort of impact Miss Lucy's outburst at the pavilion made. Word got round fast enough, but the talk mostly focused on Miss Lucy herself rather than on what she'd been trying to tell us. Some students thought she'd lost her marbles for a moment; others that she'd been asked to say what she had by Miss Emily and the other guardians; there were even some who'd actually been there and who thought Miss Lucy had been telling us off for being too rowdy on the veranda. But as I say there was surprisingly little discussion about what she'd said. If it did come up, people tended to say: "Well, so what? We already knew all that."
(That "surprisingly" is the thirty-one year-old Kathy writing.) Miss Lucy is also engaged in the serious problems of Kathy's other friend, Tommy. Tommy is big and strong, but he's a bit thick - one of the signs that, if Hailsham is an elite school, it does not assess eliteness in IQ points. The other boys make fun of him for a familiar reason: Tommy doesn't take the proper things seriously. His art is terrible, for one thing, and this is more burdensome than it might be because of Exchanges and Sales - another feature to remind us that Hailsham only looks like a good school. Four times a year, the students exhibit all their artworks, and the guardians award them tokens on a scale of merit. The best works are reserved for Madame's "Gallery"; the students are then free to buy what they like of the rest. The tokens thus circulated can be spent at the monthly Sales, in which what are pretty obviously okay-quality charity castoffs are "sold" to the students. The key to this entire economy, therefore, is good art, and Tommy's life is a misery until Miss Lucy tells him that he doesn't need to try to be good - that it's not important. This has the effect of putting a stop to Tommy's temper tantrums, and he is mystified when, much later, Miss Lucy reverses her opinion. It does matter.
Kathy won't find out about the reversal - which turns out to have occurred several days before Miss Lucy's resignation (Miss Lucy's briskness evidently having masked an uneasiness about participating in Hailsham's experiment) - until she and Tommy have left Hailsham for "The Cottages," where veterans spend up to two very lightly supervised years performing household chores and hanging out. And having sex, as part of an ongoing relationship or not. Tommy and Ruth have been a couple since Hailsham, but their relationship is more than a little rocky, and depends entirely on Tommy's diffidence. Tommy and Kathy continue to be occasional confidants, however, and in the course of talking over the prevailing rumor at The Cottages, Tommy tries to work out what Miss Lucy meant when she changed her mind.
The prevailing rumor concerns "deferrals." The rumor goes that, if two people can prove that they're really in love, then they'll be granted a deferral of three years or so before they have to take up caring. The rumor has it that deferrals are relatively easy for Hailsham alums to obtain - it is a couple from some other school who raise the issue. Ruth quite typically hints that she knows all about deferrals, even though Tommy won't back her up and Kathy tries to contradict her; together, the three manage to convey to the other Cottagers the impression that they're going to keep this valuable information to themselves.
With the doggedness of the unimaginative, Tommy works out a key to the rumor. As students he and the others were told that their art was a window into their souls. So the purpose of the "Gallery," he reasons, is to provide the powers that be with evidence that the members of a couple are or are not in love. The key word is "evidence." When she changed her mind, Miss Lucy cried out,
"Listen, Tommy, your art, it is important. And not just because it's evidence. But for your own sake. You'll get a lot from it, just for yourself."
Miss Lucy was saying more than Tommy could understand. She was thinking of Miss Ellen's idea that art would prove to the world that clones have souls. That's what she meant by evidence. Tommy's understanding is desperately similar-but-different. Since his art was dreadful or careless, it was never collected for the "Gallery." So the powers-that-be will have no evidence of his capacity to love when he and Ruth apply for a deferral. Not very long after he tells Kathy this, she learns that he has taken to drawing imaginary animals on small pieces of paper. When Tommy shows his work to her, and asks her if she likes it, she answers in the affirmative.
Part II ends abruptly. At The Cottages, Ruth has developed a truly unpleasant streak, and when she finds out that Tommy shared his theory about deferrals with Kathy before telling her about it, she turns the around and wounds both of her friends. She subsequently wounds Kathy even more deeply, and Kathy decides to sign up for caring. Part III begins years later; having recovered poorly from her first donation, Ruth is slated for a second, and Kathy, who has already made a success of her caring, asks to take Ruth on. Now, the duties of the carer are never quite spelled out; they don't seem to involve more than sitting with donors over bottled water and biscuits at the various "centers" where organs are harvested. At first, relations between Kathy and Ruth are brittle and false, but on an outing with Tommy, who's at another center, Ruth breaks down and proffers a scrap of paper with Madame's address on it - she has somehow discovered her address. When she dies, she wants Kathy and Tommy to apply for a deferral. Kathy won't hear of it, but Tommy takes the scrap.
By this point, my resistance to the nightmare was flagging. I had begun to hear in my mind's ear Brahms's Schiksalslied (Song of Destiny). This great choral work takes its text from a poem by Hölderlin that contrasts the soft lives of the gods with the wretched lives of mortals. But mortals know little of the lives of the gods; the gods may be just as wretched. So I was quite composed for the antepenultimate chapter, in which All was Explained, although I never ceased to regret that Kathy and Tommy are, at the end, a lost couple. Kathy herself is not, in fact, lost at the end of the book, but she's staring at the end of her life with equanimity, and some of that equanimity rubbed off on me. I began to see that the vast, unnamed system that bred and raised Kathy is a grim, nightmarish red herring. Another writer might have made it the centerpiece of the novel - most writers, perhaps. Mr Ishiguro's indifference to its specifics will irritate and even enrage many readers; impatience with the writer on this score is perhaps what motivated Michiko Kakutani to write,
Like the author's last novel ("When We Were Orphans"), "Never Let Me Go" is marred by a slapdash, explanatory ending that recalls the stilted, tie-up-all-the loose-ends conclusion of Hitchcock's "Psycho."
Although I sense that Ms Kakutani would have been happier with the lack of any explanation. But it is only when Kathy and Tommy track down the mysterious Madame and find themselves confronting their former head of school, Ms Emily, that we see Hailsham in perspective, and, oh, what a world Mr Ishiguro has conceived. The conversation may seem to tie up loose ends, but it actually shifts the entire posture of the story in the most provocative way. Ms Emily tells the young people that the system of cloning for body parts began after World War II, and that by the Sixties and Seventies there were those who, while realizing that the world was never going to do without this medical marvel as long as it didn't have to, believed that the clones had the right to humane treatment. Hailsham, in short, was an exceptional school within a constellation of remarkable schools within a galaxy of generally appalling institutions; one immediately imagines more-or-less abandoned children drifting through disused madhouses. Ms Kakutani asks,
And why do these same teachers place such an emphasis on the students' creativity, exhorting them to produce paintings and poems that are promptly whisked away to a secret gallery?
Much as I admire Michiko Kakutani as a critic, there is a very profound stupidity in this question. Does it imply that those who are going to die young ought to be spared the hard work of arts-training? Does it suggest that it is cruel to encourage people who will never have a chance to mature as artists to develop their artistry? Is Hailsham's gentleness a lie? It is no more a lie than any pleasant and meaningful arrangement that we make for ourselves; nothing is going to save us. All but a tiny handful of us will be lost to history, no more than a name and some dates if that when the last person who knew anything about us dies. Even within the tiny slice of time occupied by human beings, we all die young, and if it is cruel and deceitful for Ms Emily and the other guardians at Hailsham to give meaning to the lives of doomed children, then quite seriously Ms Kakutani ought to admit that she, too, is practicing cruelty and deceit in helping us to understand such difficult but enlightening artifacts as novels.
Ms Kakutani asks,
Why do they not rebel against their outrageous destiny?
I considered this often throughout the book, but I never raised my voice and said "Guys, you can just run away!" That's because I knew that, in the terms of the novel, they couldn't. Some readers will accuse Mr Ishiguro of sloppiness for not addressing the aspect of coercion, but I made an assumption going in that worked very well: the world of this novel has already changed so much from the one that we know that the clones are both trackable and recognizable in the larger world. Perhaps they have chips implanted in their bodies; perhaps their skin is green. Mr Ishiguro never delves into this question, and it would have been a bore if he had. Readers who hope that Kathy and Tommy and Ruth will make a break for the real world aren't really reading this novel. They're reading something that they hoped this novel would be. For the children's destiny is no more outrageous than yours or mine. If there is an outrageous outcome in Never Let Me Go, it is the health of the people who have benefited from the clones' organs, not to mention the complicity of the medical establishment, or of society itself, in systematic cannibalism. We naturally feel that the fate of any victim of cannibalism is outrageous, but that's largely because the victim probably didn't see it coming. For the clones in Never Let Me Go, death on the operating table or shortly after is simply the way it goes, and they have accepted that at least to the extent that you and I know that we are going to die, too.
The impulse to rescue Kathy and Tommy isn't American by nature, but it's probably sharper among Americans than it is among others. We will see how the book is received here. I lost interest in hoping for a rescue when I began to understand that Never Let Me Go is a parable about life itself. If you want a book in which a vicious ring of cannibalizing surgeons is exposed and punished, while heroic young people save their lives, go ask Dan Brown to write it. That's what he's supposed to do. (April 2005)
Copyright (c) 2005 Pourover Press