Rereading it this fall, I found the book more resonant than ever. The questions it raises around cloning feel less immediate than they used to, but the world it presents—fundamentally extractive, inequitable, and threaded with loss—is more than ever our own.
Never Let Me Go is narrated—I want to say remembered—by Kathy H., the longest-surviving member of a trio of friends who grew up together at Hailsham, a mysterious yet unmistakably British boarding school in the countryside. Degrees of intimacy among Kathy and her friends Ruth and Tommy shift and swing as they grow from childhood to adulthood, but Kathy remains both the anchor point of the triangle and the person left, by the end of novel, to sift through the detritus of their lives for what treasures endure. As an adult, Kathy works as a “carer” for “donors,” a job she finds difficult but rewarding: “Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don’t have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That’s natural.”
Each of these statements raises its own question—about what it means to be natural and not a machine, what it means to have a kind. Kathy evidently takes pride in her work, but what she describes sounds less like care than control. Her donors, she says, have impressive recovery times, and “hardly any of them have been classified as ‘agitated,’ even before fourth donation.”
What is this world in which caring is containment, and donations are numbered? It takes some time for the ideas of the book to unfold for the reader, as it did for Ishiguro himself. He first conceived of Never Let Me Go as far back as the early 1990s. In his 2008 Paris Review interview, he outlined the process:
The original idea was to write a story about students, young people who are going to go through a human life span in thirty years instead of eighty. I thought that they were going to come across nuclear weapons that were being moved around at night in huge lorries and be doomed in some way. It finally fell in place when I decided to make the students clones. Then I had a sci-fi reason for why their life spans are limited. One of the attractions about using clones is that it makes people ask immediately, What does it mean to be a human being? It’s a secular route to the Dostoyevskian question, What is a soul? (...)Never Let Me Go appeared in 2005, a work of art in the age of biotechnological reproduction. As the interview quote suggests, Ishiguro’s novel wrestles less with scientific questions than with human ones. The clones are not laboratory experiments but students—of the human condition, and of their own. The fullness of their existence as clones dawns only gradually on Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth. Like any children, their view of the world is blinkered; their identity is a fact about themselves that they grow up knowing yet not knowing at the same time.
The first part of the book centers on the day-to-day routines of their lives at Hailsham, where they are reared by “guardians” and encouraged to express themselves creatively through sculpture, drawing, and painting. Throughout their safe, secure childhood, occasional ominous notes sound; darkness lingers around the edges. A shared intimacy develops between characters and readers as our understanding grows alongside theirs. An early clue to the situation arrives when Madame, an external figure of authority, visits the school to collect some of their artwork for her “gallery.” The children of Hailsham have the sense that she dislikes them, and they decide to swarm around her in greeting to test her response:
I can still see it now, the shudder she seemed to be suppressing, the real dread that one of us would accidentally brush against her. And though we just kept on walking, we all felt it; it was like we’d walked from the sun right into chilly shade. Ruth had been right: Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn’t been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders.Being the spiders: Ishiguro’s choice to narrate the story from the perspective of the othered lends the novel its beauty and its chill. Madame’s shudder throws their evanescing innocence into relief—this is a tale not about children feeling different but about seeing that difference refracted through the gaze of society. To come of age is to understand the implications of that gaze. Tucked away at Hailsham, where they feel safe, they are being raised for harvest. It’s not a school—it’s an abattoir. Like the butler in 1989’s Remains of the Day and the AI doll in 2021’s Klara and the Sun (all three of Ishiguro’s narrators share similarities of affect, and the books seem to compose a trilogy of English life past, present, and future), Kathy H. will grapple all her life with the harsh truths of her home. (...)
Never Let Me Go maintains its timelessness in part via the euphemistic terminology Ishiguro assigns to cloning (the word itself appears in the book only a few times). When they become adults, the clones “donate” three or four times before they “complete” and die. The specifics around clone technology remain opaque—there are no scientist characters, no labs, no public debates. Cloning is as given and mysterious as death itself.
Can you call something a donation if the person is required to give it, has been bred for the very purpose of giving? It’s like saying cattle donate hamburgers. Can you call a life complete when it doesn’t include agency around choices of career or family? In its gnomic simplicity, Ishiguro’s language calls attention to the ways in which social agreement shellacs over the complicated reality of extraction. (...)
Because of its speculative element, Never Let Me Go is sometimes referred to as a science-fiction novel, but I don’t think the label fits. The novel inhabits an uncanny valley all its own, staking out a particular relationship to place and time. In much of his work, Ishiguro writes about and from a mythic England, deploying recognizable iconography: the boarding school, the countryside of cottages and hedges and winding roads, trips to the seaside. This allows him to weave the fabric of his story out of imagined touchstones rather than a specific lived reality. (...)
Against the backdrop of these “savage meritocracies,” Ishiguro’s gaze rests purposefully on his three main characters in the foreground. The political context gives shape to the human dramas of love and friendship; at the same time, the attention paid to those dramas insists upon the fundamental value and worth of the characters. In her narration, Kathy often addresses the reader directly: “I don’t know how it was where you were,” she says, or “I’m sure somewhere in your childhood, you too had an experience like ours that day.” There’s an anxious, beseeching quality to these addresses that escalates in pathos as the book goes on.(...)
Holding on tightly against forces that will sweep them away—this is what Kathy and Tommy can do for one another. Matthew Salesses has pointed out that causally connected, character-driven plots emphasize individual choices; such stories revolve around “the idea that human agency is how to make sense of the human experience.” But not every person, and not every character, has that agency. Ishiguro’s novels often center the perspective of marginalized individuals who have little control over the larger political forces of their times. Just because individuals don’t have meaningful agency doesn’t mean their lives don’t have meaning. Like Kafka, Ishiguro shows how the dictates of systems override the capacity of the individual. But unlike Kafka, his systems can be beautiful, even beloved. Stevens loves Darlington Hall; Kathy loves Hailsham; and Klara loves the human girl she’s made to befriend, the girl who will abandon her. So too do many of us love a world that doesn’t always love us back.
Once they realize what’s happening to them, the clones don’t fight back, or try to escape. There’s no clone uprising, no battle scenes; nobody takes to the streets. Over the years, talking about my love for the novel, I’ve met many people who object to this aspect of it. As a representative Goodreads reviewer wrote in 2009, “Kathy and Tommy finally get all the answers about their school and what was actually going on, and they respond by … going about their lives in the exact same way as before. I mean, good God.” People are entitled to their own responses, but isn’t this the most resonant part of all? In 2025, as oceans rise, glaciers melt, violence increases, and dictators expand their powers, many of us do the same as Kathy and Tommy: we keep living our lives as best we can, holding on to moments of human decency where we find them, taking care of one another.
by Alix Ohlin, LA Review of Books | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Excellent review. One of my favorite books (maybe top five). What struck me most was the precision of the writing. Every word and sentence, perfect. See also, art imitating life:
Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine (MIT Technology Review):]
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"It may be disturbing to characterize human bodies in such commodifying terms, but the unavoidable reality is that human biological materials are an essential commodity in medicine, and persistent shortages of these materials create a major bottleneck to progress. (...)There might be a way to get out of this moral and scientific deadlock. Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman."
