This is the third of Kazuo Ishiguro’s books I’ve read, and it left me with a blank space, whereas Klara and the Sun as well as The Remains of the Day both troubled me and filled me with indescribable sensations that still linger in me and reignite, in a flash, just thinking of them. But this blank space still manages to disturb me.
Never Let Me Go is about a near future where children are grown to provide organs. The novel focuses on three friends who grow up in a sort of boarding school for donors. They and their peers grow in this idyllic environment, learning to be children, playing and studying and seeing very little of the external world, but always wondering about their teachers’ emphasis on their inability to have children as well as about the art they are asked to create by one of the school’s benefactors. When they become adults and leave the school to go into half-way houses for their kind, some become curious about their origins and their destiny, about the humans they were made from, as well as , the purpose of the art they created. The answers they do find leave them more perplexed than relieved, and the questions start to fade as they begin doing what they were brought into the world to do: giving organs. As the three friends begin to donate or to care for donors, the necessities of their condition cause them to drift somewhat apart, though they do finally reconnect to remember and understand their existence before they, too, must finally die (or “complete”).
The right or wrong of the practice of growing children only to serve as donors is given very little space in the novel, though the immorality of it is intimated here and there and discussed between a few of the main characters late in the story. But Ishiguro’s writing is so skillful that the question rattles the reader’s mind all on its own, it rattled me as I started to understand the reason for these children’s existence and as I continued to follow their lives, which they live mostly in ignorance of what they are destined for. In the end, I felt a strange emptiness, a blankness I could not explain, and I still feel it now.
L.A.
