'Never Let Me Go'

For when the vibe is intimate, ruminant, and uncanny.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s sixth novel is part coming of age story, part philosophical musing on the nature of the human soul. The story unfolds gradually as the narrator remembers her two best friends and their lives together, first at an elite boarding school then after. Part of the novel's genius is that Kathy is both an audience surrogate and molded by the dystopian world she grew up in. While she never expresses it outright, through her testimony and the fact that we, too, are products of our time, the reader gets the sense that something is off about her life.

The adults around the three kids don’t treat them entirely like you’d expect young children to be treated. Eventually we find out that she and her friends aren’t treated like humans because they are, in fact, clones developed with the express purpose of donating organs to real people until they die. The clones accept their reality almost passively, although they do believe that if they are able to fall in love they might be able to waylay their 'fate.'

In a striking political undercurrent, there doesn’t seem to be much will to end the practice of raising clones as human sacrifices, and in fact the treatment of clones seems to get worse over the course of Kathy's life. The banal acceptance of this obviously sinister system by everyone involved lends an unnerving quality to the novel and makes room for a subtle layering of the role societal norms play in shaping the meaning of a life, the quiet power of small moments collected over the course of that life, and the nature of choice. I’m not too proud to say that I cried ugly tears several times while reading.

The book can also function as a cautionary tale in our current cultural environment. People are cloning their dogs. People are bringing back extinct animals. People are creating babies in test tubes, freezing them indefinitely, and, in some cases, implanting them in host women with whom they share no genetic material for their incubation and delivery to a family in defiance of a natural order. We should always remember that we can play God in our endeavors, but it is a dangerous enterprise indeed to think that we are God. We are human. We can never be anything other than human. Our fallibility is impossible to overstate. Creating God-like tools does not make us, at our core more God-like. It means that we wildly infallible creatures are all the more dangerous to ourselves and others.

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$9.99 on Amazon