After enjoying Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Klara and the Sun, I thought I'd try another of his works. I chose Never Let Me Go.
Like Klara, it is a first person narrative, the narrator being Kathy. Kathy is a young woman who tells the story of her life at Hailsham, a boarding school, and in particular her friendship there, and subsequently, with Tommy and Ruth.
From the beginning there are hints of something different. Kathy is a carer and her 'patients' are referred to as 'donors'. What they donate and why they need care unfolds gradually. At the time of telling the tale, Kathy is 31 years old and it is her reminiscences of Ruth and Tommy that take her - and us - back to the beginning at Hailsham.
The beginning, because there is no reference to what came before.
The students at Hailsham were taught by Guardians. Once a month or so, a mysterious female whom the students and guardians called Madame appeared at the school and took away works of art which had been created by the students. They are led to believe that there is a 'Gallery' to which these paintings and drawings are taken, with no knowledge why, or of what happens to them.
"I keep thinking about all these things. Like why Madame comes and takes away our best pictures. What's that for exactly?"
"It's for the Gallery."
"But what is her gallery? She keeps coming here and taking away our best work. She must have stacks of it by now."
Thus the author creates an air of mystery, perhaps even darkness, which he subjects to a process of slow reveal throughout the book.
At this point in my story, if I have tempted you to read the book, you should stop reading this, because spoilers follow.
About a quarter of the way through the book, Kathy finds a cassette tape of a song Never Let Me Go by Judy Bridgewater. Later she reflects:
"There's a bit which keeps coming round when Judy sings 'Never let me go ... Oh baby, baby ... Never let me go'. By then, of course we all knew something I hadn't known back then, which was that none of us could have babies."
And there it is, a casual remark that is the first shock for the reader. It's a technique I noticed in Klara and the Sun; you are reading at your normal speed - which is perhaps a bit too fast - and you are jolted into "Wait! Did I just read they can't have babies? There's been no mention of that before."
Shortly after this episode, Miss Lucy, the most open of the Guardians, responds in class to a discussion about the future for the students.
"If no one else will talk to you, then I will. The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day. 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. That's what each of you was created to do."
Looking back on this some years later, Kathy says that Ruth said Miss Lucy "told us a lot more; how before donations we'd all spend some time as carers, about the usual sequence of the donations, the recovery centres and so on - but I'm pretty sure she didn't."
Just before halfway in the book, when Kathy, Ruth and Tommy are at a new place, the Cottages - which feels like a hippy commune: a bit of gardening, some general mooning about - Ruth tells Kathy about two of the 'inmates' taking a trip to Cromer and claiming "they saw this ... person. Working in an open-plan office. They reckon this person's a possible. For me."
Kathy muses "since each of us was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for each of us, a model getting on with his or her life."
And that's it; Kathy, Ruth, Tommy and the others are clones. We don't hear anything of their pre-Hailsham life because they didn't have one. They are part of an organ farming factory process. It's the genius of Ishiguro that, despite it being a dark, dark context, he invests it with a sense of normality. The actors - not in the drama, because there is no drama, just events - slowly awaken to the realities of their 'lives', but not with any emotion, just acceptance.
Years later, Kathy and Tommy seek out Madame, who tells them "we challenged the entire way the donations programme was being run ... we demonstrated to the world that if clones - or students, as we preferred to call you - were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being ... that was why we collected your art. We selected the best of it and put on special exhibitions ... 'There, look!' we could say. How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully human?'"
By this time, Kathy has become carer to Ruth, who gives her four donations and 'completes'.
Now Tommy is her donor and, after three donations, he muses "You know why it is, Kath, why everyone worries so much about the fourth? It's because they're not sure they'll really complete."
"I'd been wondering for a while if this would come up ... You'll have heard the same talk. How maybe, after the fourth donation, even if you've technically completed, you're still conscious in some sort of way; how then you find there are more donations, plenty of them, on the other side of that line; how there are no more recovery centres, no carers, no friends; how's there's nothing to do except watch your remaining donations until they switch you off."
At the end Kathy, after many years as a wonderful carer, opts to begin the transition to become a donor. The cycle nears completion. There are no tears; no regrets. Perhaps a sense of inevitability rather than duty. It's written in such a calming way that the reader doesn't feel extremes of emotion, rather reflecting on the beauty of three young lives lived well. The author warns us of where we as the human race might go, but with a poignancy that helped this reader at least to see through the darkness into the light.
This painting by the late 19th century Dutch bird illustrator Johannes Gerardus Keulemans.
