Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, Vintage Books 2005
Rarely has a writer unthreaded the woven intricacies of an intrapersonal conflict with as much deftness as Kazuo Ishiguro did with the protagonist of his 1989 novel The Remains of the Day. With the same dexterity, he sews together a beautiful patchwork of relationships, however strained at the seams by the incessant tug of an appalling inevitability.
Angled from the hesitant perspective of his adult narrator Kathy, she begins by recounting her time at Hailsham, her idyllic preparatory school/home at an undisclosed location in the English countryside. Yet it’s only a collective, sheltered ignorance that permitted her and best friends Ruth and Tommy to believe in the idealism of their childhoods. Ishiguro methodically wipes away the halcyon glow of Hailsham. Revealed underneath are the dark layers of truth and reality undermining their relationships.
As their years together conclude in their late teens, they concede (each by different means and to varying degrees of success) to the most fatalistic of these truths: what they were created (yes, created) to be. The latter portion of the narrative traces their attempts at reconciliation to that acceptance, and how they can salvage love under the threat of fate.
This novel is dichotomous in its success. Here Ishiguro shows again he is a virtuoso in fashioning characters worthy of our full affections. Yet within the context of this intimacy, he uncloaks a society that dehumanizes them in the most mortifying way. Readers’ hearts will break and hands tremble in the reading of it.