Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go
I read Never Let Me Go for the first time on an overnight trip to Barrow-in-Furness. The surroundings - a bench outside a nightclub and a railway waiting room - were so completely fitting for the devastating bleakness of the novel that it haunted me for days. I read every review I could find, even the TV Tropes page, desperate to find someone else who felt the story as viscerally as I had.
Never Let Me Go tells the story of Kathy and her friends Tommy and Ruth, who grow up in an institution called Hailsham. Partway through the story, it's revealed that all the children in Hailsham are clones, being raised as organ donors for people on the outside. (I knew that going in, but when Kathy discussed her work as a carer I assumed that was her role; the casual mention of being a carer for a while before becoming a donor was almost as staggering a revelation.) The three friends live out a sometimes bitter love triangle, and try to understand what their lives are really all about, but their fate is determined for them and inescapable.
The details of how the clones are created and how their organs are harvested are left very vague. Deliberately so, because this isn't really a story about cloning. It's a story about how we live when we know the only thing ahead of us is a distressing death.
Each of the three main characters takes a different approach. Kathy is an almost pathological people-pleaser, brushing aside questions about what she wants in favour of what others expect from her. Ruth is deeply manipulative, trampling the others' feelings to get what she wants. And Tommy tries to hold onto his dignity by sticking to his personal moral code, even when it makes no sense to those closest to him.
The setting strips the characters of anything we might turn to for comfort in the face of impending death. As clones, they have no birth family, and they are explicitly unable to have children. The only people they become close to are their carers and fellow donors, who will soon be dead in their turn. They are offered no chance to build a legacy, and even the people whose lives their organs save never think of them as people.
The only reference to religion in the entire book is a ruined churchyard used as a meeting spot. The world is not convinced these young people even have souls, so they have never been taught to hope for heaven. The closest they come to considering an afterlife is a morbid urban legend in which they remain conscious after their technical death.
In the face of such bleakness, they create their own comforts. Fantasies of "dream futures" and the persistent rumours of a deferral for a couple who are truly in love allow them to get through their days without thinking too hard about what's to come, even finding joy for a little while. It's only when they press the fantasy too far, like Ruth's approach to the woman she imagines could have been her model, that the denial collapses and the grim truth takes over.
Plenty of reviewers have observed that the rumoured deferrals are already a pitifully small thing to ask. They don't hold out any hope of escaping their fate, only of putting it off for a couple of years. And the interesting thing is that there's already a kind of deferral built into the system. The characters spend an open-ended period in transitional housing between leaving Hailsham and beginning their carer training. It's implied to be their choice when to start the training, which means that they could theoretically claim their deferral without any official approval. But none of them do: they all choose to begin their carer training and start the path towards ultimately becoming donors.
Perhaps it's as simple as not daring to defy the system that created them, but there's also a sense that they can't really imagine escaping their fate, so that to try to put it off only means it will hang over their heads at a distance for longer. Towards the end, Tommy asks Kathy whether she's tired of being a carer and wants to get on with becoming a donor; characteristically, Kathy answers in terms of the good she can do as a carer rather than thinking of what she actually wants.
In spite of everything she's seen as a carer, Kathy's attitude to becoming a donor herself seems a little unrealistic. Several times, she talks about being able to quietly contemplate her memories of Hailsham and Ruth and Tommy once she no longer has to work as a carer. She's seen the toll that pain and drugs and weakness take on donors, and yet she never seems to imagine it happening to her. It's as if she has one final layer of protective fantasy that still isn't shattered by the end of the novel.
Another theme that keeps coming up is the way the characters were "told and not told" about their fate. On one level, the revelation that is such a shock to the reader is underwhelming to the characters because they had already been told their grim destiny. But on another level, they'd been told in such a way that it didn't seem completely real, leaving room for those fantasies. In the climactic scene, Miss Emily insists this was for the best since it allowed them the equivocal joys they managed to create for themselves.
Tommy disagrees, saying Miss Lucy was right when she said they should have been clearly told. But it's hard to say what difference it would have made. Perhaps they would have rebelled, but even without their conditioning, the system was stacked against them. Perhaps they could have reached some kind of acceptance, but in the face of such a bleak ending, apathy might have been the best they could manage.
In the end, as the film adaptation makes explicit, we are not so different from them. We have more comforts available to us, but how much do they really help in the face of death? Like Ruth, like Kathy, we cling to our fantasies and avoid facing head on the reality of how it has to end. And that, I think, is why it haunts me so much.