'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 meaning of life and the nature of the human soul. The story unfolds gradually as Kathy, the narrator, begins to understand the society in which she lives, her role in it, and her feelings about herself. She remembers, throughout the course of the novel, her two best friends and their lives together at an elite boarding school and after. Kathy is a reliable narrator, and through her testimony the reader gets the sense that something is off with the school and with her life. The adults around them don’t treat them entirely like you’d expect young children to be treated. It is eventually revealed 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. This is taken in stride by the three clones and, seemingly, by the society that they live on the fringes of and, in a gruesomely direct but also distant way, serve. The clones accept their deaths passively and without struggle. There doesn’t seem to be much will anywhere to end the inhumane practice of raising certain people as human sacrifices so that others can live. The banal acceptance of this obviously sinister system by everyone involved lends an unnerving quality to a novel that would otherwise be a rather traditionalist musing on the meaning of life and makes room for a subtle layering of the role societal norms play in shaping that meaning, the quiet power of small moments collected over the course of a life, and the nature of choice. I’m not too proud to say that I cried ugly tears several times while reading.

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