We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.

Overall Impression: this was definitely a one of a kind book and doesn’t fit into typical genre conventions. The prose is lyrical, full of anguished tension, and humanity, I’m amazed at how Ishiguro managed to build such a convincing narrative voice. You do need to be in the correct mood to read this book, though, as the plot points can be a bit of a hit or miss depending on your expectations of the book’s content.

If you want to go into this book completely blind, you should probably not read this book review (?) but in my opinion knowing some of the plot of the book won’t drastically decrease your enjoyment of the book. Before reading this, I watched the movie trailer and read the wikipedia plot summary, but still really enjoyed the whole reading experience!

Summary:

Never Let Me Go is a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. It is set in an alternate historical timeline in 1990s Britain, where cloning technology is so advanced that individuals are cloned from others to have their organs harvested.
The narrator, Kathy H, is an adult reflecting on past events. Kathy and her friends, Ruth and Tommy come from a boarding school called Hailsham. They and the other pupils are all clones. When they grow up, they will first become ‘carers’ and look after ‘donors,’ clones who are undergoing surgery to extract their organs, then become ‘donors’ themselves. Eventually, they will all complete (die).
Kathy, Ruth, Tommy, and the other Hailsham pupils experience their childhood in a fragile balance between knowing and unknowing. They know they are clones, yet do not fully comprehend what lies in store. They lead lives like ordinary schoolchildren, forming social cliques and relationships. As they mature and move out of school, Kathy details how their relationships evolve and fall apart over time, eventually telling the (heartbreaking!!!!) story of how she, Ruth, and Tommy come to terms with the fleeting lives they lead.

Escaping is Overrated

I think one of the most prominent pieces of criticism people voice out against Never Let Me Go is the perceived “lack of plot” and “the way the characters passively accept their fate”. I think you have to be in the right frame of mind to read the book, honestly, but I don’t think Never Let Me Go deserves a bad review just because it doesn’t adhere to general  dystopian tropes.

Dystopian books are playgrounds for authors to invent their own alternate realities, leading to vastly different worlds such as The Hunger Games, Divergent, Red Rising, 1984. The premise for each story is different, but generally they all involve some rebellion against power: the protagonists don’t just sit still and agree  – maybe they do at first, but it certainly doesn’t stay that way – they are often those in lower echelons of society, learn the nasty truth about the world they live in and people power and make a difference. (Their success is less certain). But Never Let me Go is full of understanding and acceptance. Not only does the book blurb give away the whole clone thing, from a young age, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy already know that they are clones. Their realization of what “completion” is full of anguish, but comes slowly, as if they were maturing like normal humans, learning to shoulder ‘adult responsibilities’ and the ‘harshness of the world’ like any graduating schoolchildren would.

There isn’t a “switch” or “backstabbing moment”, when, for example, the protagonist realizes they have been cheated all along, or there’s some evil force in it for them.

There are moments where Kathy narrates cracks in their facade: Ruth losing her temper when they try to look for her ‘possible’  – the original human Ruth was cloned off – the awkwardness and dancing around the topic of caring and donations. But no one talks about escape, they rarely even complain about the system. The only time they try to fight the system is near the end of the book, where Kathy and Tommy follow a rumor and try to defer his 4th operation by claiming to be in love to the ex-headmistress of Hailsham. When the rumor is revealed to be false, Tommy has a fit of anger, but calms down with Kathy’s help. Soon, he completes during his 4th donation, and after Kathy reminisces about her memories with him and Ruth, she ‘drives off to where she was supposed to be’.

The point is that the disturbing element of Never Let Me Go really lies in how psychologically the protagonists have been oppressed. It’s less on physical constraints – less on surveillance, on “peacekeepers” or brutal dictatorships – it’s more on how the unsaid rules of the game called society dictate the way their short lives unfold, and how its so deeply ingrained in them that they don’t even think of rebelling.

This might sound weird to us reading this. No modern reader is going to simply accept having their organs taken away from them. But what if Never Let Me Go is simply an allegory for the other things in life we passively accept? What if Kathy’s submissiveness to the system was not a flaw in the plot, but Ishiguro’s way of commenting on the implicit rules our society dishes out, and how everyone else accepts it?

“We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.” (from the movie not the book)

The way the clones mature and come to understand their role in society is not too different from real life. As this goodreads user “Christine Eakin” explains, Japanese and Russian audiences resonate better with the plot of Never Let Me Go, simply because they come from societies where “the reality…of that society is so pervasive…[and] people are raised to believe that it’s noble to, be a cog, really, and fulfill your destiny and your responsibility to the greater society”. As we grow up, we hold notional ideals that we need to accomplish a certain list of things for society: get a job, contribute to the economy, pay taxes and help society for the greater good. For those of us lucky enough, we lead lives like Kathy in Hailsham – attending an education. Even then, we let society impose these ‘invisible rules’ on us, that most of us never think of challenging, simply because we were taught them growing up – just like the clones.

There is nothing to escape from (I)

For most people who don’t have that moment of luck or preconditioned fortunes, life ends up not much different from a clone donor – first donation, second donation…fourth donation where maybe “you find there are more donations, plenty of them…[but] there are no more recovery centers, no carers, no friends, … there’s nothing to do except watch your remaining donations until they switch you off” (279). In other words, losing your youth, health, in service of the demands of the greater society, whether that’s typing away in office blocks or toiling at construction sites.

How do you run from that? Running, screaming, saying it’s not fair, that doesn’t always change things, especially rules society puts in place to keep itself running. How do you escape from the fact that you need to work a job to earn a living? How do you escape from a lack of social mobilitiy?

Although it’s never explicitly dealt with in the text, clones are treated as sub-par to ‘humans’, mostly “reared” with very little rights. It’s likely impossible that any society, any organization would even care for them, much less help them turn their lives around, especially if it meant prioritizing helping them over ‘normal humans’.

That’s likely why Kathy and Tommy don’t think about ‘running away’, not even when his fourth donation and death is imminent. The whole gut punching element of the book doesn’t come from this bitter fracturing of Kathy’s childhood dreams, or bitter oppression of clones. It comes from the fact that Kathy and her friends don’t fight back, hardly even think about fighting back, because they’ve already lost the fight on a psychological level. Their doomed fates echo to readers, because all of us have unsaid roles to fulfill in society. Even if we were dully aware of it in school, even if our education system somewhat trains us to take on jobs in real society, growing up and starting to experience that burden can feel like an invisible jail – and that’s why asking Kath, Tommy and Ruth to run away is impossible.

Non-adherence to genre tropes

I’m fascinated by the extent at which people don’t escape…and I think if you look around us that is the remarkable fact how much we accept what faith has given us – Kazuo Ishiguro

Also, “escape” or “resistance” is arguably an overused trope in dystopian literature. Well the trope can build gripping narratives and lucrative intellectual property, it’s something always in the audiences’ expectations. The deviation from this sort of “escape from being cloned” trope is in my opinion one of the aspects in which Never Let Me Go, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is distinguished is set apart from other ‘just YA fiction’ books.

It brings a different perspective to the topic it discusses. Rather than just telling the readers ‘cloning people is so bad, look at how my protagonist is leading a rebellion against the government to save her and her boyfriend from dying while having an existential crisis’, it tells readers that cloning people is wrong because the way the clones are subject to this convoluted system and don’t even subject to it is so wrong.

There is nothing to escape from (II)

The way the clones come to terms with their mortality is also a reflection of how us, humans accept our own mortality. Similar to the idea of ‘donations’ and ‘completion’, we aren’t directly lied to about death. Most of us grow up knowing death is eventually the end to our lives. Yet, just like Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, we probably don’t fully comprehend what this means. It’s only when we all grow up that we start to realize what completing truly is.

I was looking for a kind of metaphor … for human condition the fact that …existence is always limited – Kazuo Ishiguro

As we grow up, we age at different speeds, just like how Kathy spends 8 years as a carer, while her friends become donors and complete first. But by the end of the book, it’s her time to start donations as well. In the end, they all face death the same way we do, it’s just exaggerated for the purposes of the plot and book.

In the meantime, we may respond to death in different ways. We might produce art, just like the children in Hailsham are asked to. Or just like many of the clones, we might entertain beliefs that there is some way to avert or slow down donations. It’s not too different from the way we try to immortalize parts of ourselves, or believe in some way to prolong aging or the afterlife.

In the end, Never Let Me Go’s protagonists show a unique kind of strength. Strength that comes not just from fighting back against a situation that is so horribly wrong and against you, but also living to accept

Empathy

Ishiguro himself admits that the clone-technology was peripheral to the main idea he wanted to express, and that the clone-human-organ-donation scenario was just a platform for him to best expand on his plot. I do agree that from a certain perspective, this does raise some plot holes. For example, if humans can clone humans, why can’t then clone specific organs? How did humans even get cloning technology?

But again, those are questions regarding typical science fiction novel worldbuilding, and it’s clear that Never Let Me Go is not your typical sci-fi novel.

In fact, to give Ishiguro some credit, he does tie in the topic of clone-technology was an interesting spin. Through the narrative of society’s harvesting of human clones for their organs, he seems to comment on how society avoids convenient solutions to complex problems, particularly through self-deceit.

Kathy and co rarely interact with the outside world (which I will admit I wish I saw more of), but it’s clear from Miss Emily and Madame (former Hailsham authorities) explain, most people would rather “not think of [them]”, or pretend that the organs harvested from clones “appeared from nowhere, or at most that they grew in a kind of vacuum” or would try to convince themselves that clones were different from ‘humans’, that “[they] were less than human”

The clones are convenient solutions to incurable diseases and problems, which society loves. They can’t go back to not having the clones’ organs, and so they choose to lie to themselves and convince themselves that clones do not ‘exist’ or deserve empathy. They either choose ignorance or dehumanization.

I feel like this attitude is echoed in society’s treatment of other complex problems. Take meat, for example. We might feel sad when hearing about a pig being killed for meat, but in our day to day life when we’re eating a hearty meal, we don’t think about cruel meat-harvesting tactics, and most of us won’t actively investigate what those look like.

We know that part of the situation is wrong, but we also can’t part with this solution, because we need food, and in particular meat.

Similarly, think of cheap labor. Commodities such as cheap clothing or palm oil are created in factories with abhorrent working conditions rampant with human rights violations. But why do they exist? Because employing working class people, paying them low wages, and selling cheap, low-quality clothing ends up in higher profit margins and cheaper items for us. We also rarely think about the consequences of these products that we buy, and rather think of factory workers as part of a mass of people, not individuals suffering. Giving them our empathy would hurt us too much, so we try to keep these things “in the shadows” and try not to think about it, while we benefit from these ‘easy solutions’.

Conclusion

Wow that was a lot and I spent way too much time finishing this post! I do think that it’s worth nothing some of these observations though, especially since there’s not much dialog on Never Let Me Go online. I highly recommend reading this book. Even if the themes do not resonate with you or I’m off about the interpretation of theme, it’s still a captivating and well-written book and will provide an entertaining experience read at surface level.