Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

The art of the beginning has gone out of fashion in literary fiction. No more action-packed opening scenes; very few great opening lines. The classic approach of opening in medias res—in the middle of things, in the heart of the story—has been relegated to the thriller and to movies. It is now typical to assume readers will persevere for some 100 pages before getting to the meat of the novel. That may be acceptable in 800-page books such as Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but in a slim volume like Kazuo Ishiguruo's 288-page Never Let Me Go, it makes a large assumption about the depth of the reader's commitment. Perhaps Ishiguruo's Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day entitles him to such a commitment; on the other hand, we all know about assumptions...

Fortunately, once it hits its stride in part 2 (page 115), Never Let Me Go is an engrossing novelistic discussion of ethical concerns in biology and child-rearing. It's not a bad story, either, and it also has some interesting characters. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are intriguing protagonists even as children at Hailsham, their curiously off-tone boarding school. Of course, there's a reason that Hailsham is so peculiar; that mystery lies at the heart of the tale. I urge you to avoid those reviews that explain the peculiarity from the outset. Yes, the "mystery" is fairly easy to guess, but knowing it in advance somewhat spoiled the book for me. I will say that the secret has overtones of science-fiction, prompting comparisons to Brave New World and 1984. But it also echoes those classic dystopian novels in that it does not handle the story as science fiction tropes. The matter-of-fact tone is what sets this novel apart.

And that tone really comes into its own in the second half of the book, when Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are embarking on their adulthood. For the secret that governs their lives is a chilling one, and treating it as a fact on a par with the sun rising in the east perversely invites us to question all of the assumptions of this world and, by extension, of our own. This questioning is, I believe, the motive behind the book. The tale is just a vehicle for the discussion; the novel a camouflage for the questions that Ishiguruo wants to pose.