KAZUO ISHIGURO

The consolations of literature are many and vaunted: Who hasn’t found delight in rereading Pride and Prejudice or in a production of The Tempest? Rarer and more challenging is the thin but intense literary vein that runs from King Lear to Beckett and beyond, works that lay bare the human condition in its stark fundamentals, and pose thereby the hardest existential questions. Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed is such a novel, as Beckett’s Endgame is such a play. Camus’s The Plague is another example. Such art explores the agony of, and the choices available in, our human struggle toward the certainty of death; it questions how we might proceed without any ultimate hope; and finds in the absurd darkness glimmers of human dignity, and of the beauty of the human spirit in adversity.

Without fanfare or Dostoyevskian histrionics, Never Let Me Go joins the ranks of these abiding works. Camus’s The Plague portrays a world dominated by disease (on the one hand, an allegory for the German occupation of France in World War II, but also an allegory for the human condition), in which characters just like us must choose their courses of action in the face of infection and imminent death. So, too, Never Let Me Go, set in 1990s Britain, posits a race of clones living alongside us, bred with the sole purpose of repeated organ donation (presumably to cure our ills) and early death. As they grow up and come into the knowledge of their fates, how will each of them live? This vision casts a searing light upon ordinary life: we are, to the novel’s characters, Baudelairean doubles (hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère), equally mortal, and hence less distanced than we would wish ourselves to be.

Thirty-one year old Kathy H., the novel’s narrator and protagonist, makes no claims for herself as an individual, and yet believes profoundly in her exceptionalism: she tells the stories of her adolescence first at Hailsham, a boarding school, and then in a group home with, among others, her closest friends Ruth and Tommy, as if they were the most important in the world. For most of her short life, she hopefully believes that their love—a passion somewhat fluidly distributed among the three of them—may be strong enough to triumph over their fate, and to avert death itself. In this, albeit more literally, she resembles most of us. She recounts for us (and the narrative is very explicit in addressing an audience: she doesn’t simply tell her story, she tells it to us) her relatively brief life, replete with the details of a privileged childhood and the spats and reconciliations of teenage society; but her deceptively superficial account is, ultimately, a reckoning with mortality—that of her friends, and her own.

As Tolstoy observes in The Death of Ivan Ilych, “The example of a syllogism which he had learned in Kiezewetter’s Logic: ‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,’ had seemed to him all his life to be true as applied to Caius but certainly not as regards himself.” The horror that human life must end in death is comprehensible, even tolerable, as long as it is not my death. Who, really, can conceive of her own annihilation? Against this unbearable truth, art has long been considered a bulwark: Ars longa, vita brevis, as Hippocrates succinctly put it; or, more cynically, selon Eliot, “These are the fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Kathy H. tells her story also with this hope. In the novel, Ishiguro renders that hope concrete: poignantly, the children at Kathy’s Hailsham are encouraged to create artworks, the finest of which are selected for a mysterious “gallery” held by one of the school’s senior administrators, a woman known only as “Madame”: it is bruited about that the finest young artists may be offered a reprieve from their inexorable life’s course, which is to become first “carers” (looking after other clones as they are stripped, one by one, of their vital organs) and then “donors” themselves.

Ishiguro first makes literal this fantasy about art’s power, only then to reveal, inevitably, its vanity and inadequacy. In a culminating confrontation between Kathy and Tommy and their former school leaders, Madame and Miss Emily, the young couple (and we along with them) are forced to accept that their art, regardless of its quality, is no defense against fate. It doesn’t really matter who wields the power—whether it is Society, as for Kathy and her kind, or Nature, or God, for the religious: the result, for clones and humans alike, is the same.

I FIRST READ Never Let Me Go in proofs, before its official publication. In my plain-jacketed copy, its central conceit was neither advertised nor explained. When Kathy H. announces, in the novel’s first paragraph, that “I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years . . . I’m not trying to boast . . . My donors have always tended to do much better than expected,” there were no immediate explanations for her terms. Rather, the parameters of Kathy H.’s parallel world emerged only over time, through her account of an upbringing both familiar and subtly but profoundly awry.

Kathy is not a flamboyant figure, not the sort who dominates—unlike her friend Ruth, repeatedly the leader in their youthful antics. Retiring, even timid, Kathy is emphatically ordinary, down to the almost weary flatness of her tone: “While we’re on the subject of tokens, I want just to say a bit about our Sales, which I’ve mentioned a few times already. The Sales were important to us because that was how we got hold of things from outside . . .” Her autobiography is necessarily comprised of anecdotes about special pencil cases and lost cassette tapes, rather than feats of bravery or politically significant adventures.

Against this banality of adolescence—which could, crucially, be anybody’s adolescence—Ishiguro’s juxtaposition of radical strangeness is deeply unsettling. The effect is not unlike that of Ishiguro’s canonical early novel, The Remains of the Day, in which he sets the unquestioning quotidian devotions of the butler, Stevens, against the abhorrent appeasement politics of his master, Lord Darlington. Both Stevens and Kathy are pawns in life’s larger games, but this apparent insignificance only fortifies the tenderness of their humanity. These creations insist, by their very existence, that you do not need to be a member of Parliament or a celebrity or even a headmistress in order for your life to matter. Ishiguro is always mindful that while History may unfold around us—or allegorical Science Fiction, as the case may be—each individual is passionate in the pursuit of his or her small existence, a life made up precisely of pencil cases and cuff links, of light bulbs, scissors, sore throats.

This ability to convey life’s ironic, even agonizing, palimpsestic quality is a particular strength of Ishiguro’s, essential to the force of his fiction. But no literary appreciation of this capacity could have prepared me for the novel’s long visceral afterlife, for the way it would inhabit my psyche and enter my lexicon as shorthand for a particular type of soul-altering experience. In the years since its publication, I’ve had many conversations about this book, and have discovered that almost without exception other readers have shared my experience: we may initially have been bemused by the smallness of Kathy’s memories, by the carefully detailed parameters of her sheltered life; but in an appreciation—a sympathetic understanding—of her doomed struggles, we have allowed the novel’s characters and their fates to enter us, reminders of the simultaneous value and futility of existence itself. As we journey through our own lives—sooner or later inevitably, ourselves, carers, like Kathy, and/or the cared-for, like the novel’s donors—we hold Kathy and her cohort uneasily in mind. Indeed, Ishiguro’s haunting novel proves eponymous.

This is a particularly acute discomfort, surely, for those who’ve enjoyed the privilege of education, who’ve pursued knowledge in the passionate belief that we are “improved” by it. We may not have lounged in pavilions on the playing fields of posh boarding schools, as do Kathy and her friends in their youthful days at Hailsham; but if we’re readers at all, chances are we’ve taken on faith the idea that our education is for something, and not merely a means to pass the time. We trust that our lives are more meaningful, more useful, or more profoundly lived—that in some way we will live better, if not longer—as a result of our enriching education. But what if, at life’s heart, there is only death? From a certain long-term perspective, this will always be true; but for Kathy and her ilk, destined to die young, this swiftly becomes unignorable fact.

As Kathy will discover only at the end of the novel, she and her Hailsham friends are the result of an experiment within the broader social experiment of cloning. In their burning confrontation with Madame and Miss Emily, Kathy and Tommy learn the specifics of what she had always murkily grasped: that Hailsham—at this point in the novel defunct—was separate from the mainstream, a special place. It was conceived by a few liberal zealots, who insisted that the clones, or “students” as they are euphemistically called, be given rigorous instruction and a fine quality of life; that they be encouraged to study, to reflect, and to create art; that, in sum, their lives thereby be granted some meaning beyond the purely utilitarian. It is a belief that has, by the time of the novel’s telling, lost its currency; just as in our own times, society’s pendulum has swung strongly toward support of the strictly purposeful, and the value of a liberal arts education—of reading history, or classics, or art history for their own sake—is increasingly in question.

We understand almost before Kathy herself the passionate nostalgia that she experiences for her school days—a nostalgia that she experiences even before she leaves Hailsham, and that she suffers markedly more than do her intimates Ruth and Tommy. She senses, from the outset, the importance of clinging to the pleasures of the present, or the past; while they, naïvely, are focused on the future. As she observes with hindsight, “I never appreciated in those days the sheer effort Ruth was making to move on, to grow up and leave Hailsham behind.” Kathy may not at first see hers to be a nostalgia for faith, but this is essentially what it is: this willed transition to adulthood that all the “students” undergo—moving from the hermetic safety of institutions like Hailsham first to the Cottages, a sort of halfway house, and thence into the wider world—will involve accepting that their life’s purpose is either to die (or to attain “completion,” as the clones’ death is delicately termed) or to ease that path for their fellows. The “students” must make this transition as soon as they reach maturity—at little more than seventeen or eighteen years old; whereas we ordinary mortals, in our equally strange contemporary reality, are often able to deny its truth for much of our long lives.

Given this, the “students” are left to look back upon their childhoods—that brief, halcyon time—as most of us, in age, may look back upon our lives entire. In Kathy’s recollection, small incidents take on great meaning, are interpreted and reinterpreted, and yearning—the unlived life—becomes paramount. She reads her life like a book, searching for signs, for explanations of why it must be as it is, or for ways in which it might have been different. Unlike Ruth, and ultimately Tommy also (certainly after the dramatic encounter with their former guardians in which he comes to accept his fate), Kathy H. remains an analyst, a true student, to the last—as if making sense of her senseless trajectory could help her, could imbue it with significance: “These are the fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

THAT THE “STUDENTS” are incapable of reproducing is essential to the novel’s power: as Cicero famously observed, “Of all nature’s gifts to the human race, what is sweeter to a man than his children?” And indeed, children, more profoundly even than art, protect us from being overwhelmed by the ubiquity of decay and loss. As we face the deaths of our parents, and then those of our peers, it is the pressing needs of our children—the faith in their futures—that keep us in life. The irony of course is that our desire, then, is to protect them precisely from this adult knowledge of the inevitability of death, just as Kathy, at Hailsham, is held by the teachers and staff in blissful ignorance; and in this sense, what provides our lives with meaning is the perpetuation of a lie.

One of the novel’s central images—and that which gives the book its indelible title—is of Kathy as a young girl, dancing by herself in her dormitory to her favorite pop song, “Never Let Me Go”:

What was so special about this song? Well, the thing was, I didn’t used to listen properly to the words; I just waited for that bit that went: “Baby, baby, never let me go . . .” And what I’d imagine was a woman who’d been told she couldn’t have babies, who’d really, really wanted them all her life. Then there’s a sort of miracle and she has a baby, and she holds this baby very close to her and walks around singing: “Baby, never let me go . . .”

As Kathy is miming this fantasy, “swaying about slowly in time to the song, holding an imaginary baby to my breast,” Madame passes in the corridor and witnesses the sight:

She just went on standing out there, sobbing and sobbing, staring at me through the doorway with that same look in her eyes she always had when she looked at us, like she was seeing something that gave her the creeps. Except this time there was something else, something extra in that look I couldn’t fathom.

This is but one of many moments that Kathy attempts, much later, to “read,” hoping thereby to gain some understanding of her life. These recalled incidents comprise the novel, puzzle pieces held up to the light. (In this, she is the polar opposite of Ishiguro’s Stevens: to the last, he is someone who willfully refuses to “read” the incidents that have defined him, leaving us to read them for him, and to feel a pain that he cannot consciously allow.) When finally Kathy meets Madame, they will discuss this encounter, and Kathy will know what was in Madame’s mind.

But as the novel makes clear, there is a value in her lifelong uncertainty. The impulse to interpret, to attribute meaning to events and to the actions of others, is what impels us, ourselves, to act in certain ways. It is, quite simply, what gives us hope, even though our own deaths are as certainly inscribed as Kathy’s or Tommy’s or Ruth’s. The demystification of our human storytelling—the moment of certainty, when we know for sure what was intended, or what actually happened—is also the end of that hope. In the novel, it leads Tommy to run out into a night field, “raging, shouting, flinging his fists and kicking out”; and subsequently, devastatingly, to be resigned to his fate.

This is not the case for Kathy, for all the calm flatness of her narration. Even as she approaches her own end, she does not renounce—she does not rail, but nor does she go gently. Rather, she illustrates that to imagine a truth and to know a truth aren’t mutually exclusive, but that the dance between the two—a life spark that could be called “reflection”—proves in itself a certain, other, kind of hope. The fragments that Kathy has collected are not, in the end, negligible, even if they cannot prevent her physical annihilation. The pictures she drew and sculptures she made while a child at Hailsham may have proven worthless (like any drawerful of child’s drawings, years later), but the creation that is her story—a story strangely truer than any truth—has its hold upon us, and will never let us go.