Never Let Me Go
is the tale of Kathy H. She tells us she is thirty-one years old and a carer.
The reader doesn’t know what this means, but it sounds like a good thing, and
Kathy is proud that she’s been a carer for over eleven years, which is apparently
well beyond the norm. Her long tenure is partially due to her being a very good
carer.
Ishiguro uses this device throughout. Kathy uses phrases or descriptions of events that don’t make sense initially, but slowly, the reader infers the meanings and settings.
Most of the novel is Kathy’s account of her childhood, education, and relationship with her two best friends, Ruth and Tommy. In their childhood and adolescence, they are at Hailsham, a boarding school in England. They are clearly a privileged set but also closely controlled and sequestered. Their teachers, known as guardians, and the rules at Hailsham are an odd mix. In some ways strictly regimented; in others strangely permissive. The guardians are never cruel and seldom even harsh, though they are somewhat aloof.
The school seems to be preparing the children for some special role in society. When their training is complete, they become carers.
But carer…is not the ultimate role. There is another function the reader begins to grasp with outrage and horror. The children slowly understand their fate by degrees, like the reader, but unlike the reader, the children calmly accept their future and even seem to almost look forward to it.
Thinking back now, I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves – about who we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside – but hadn’t yet understood what any of it meant.
My Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars
Never Let Me Go has to be considered dystopian, though most of the time, it doesn’t feel like it. It is also Sci-Fi, though it doesn’t feel like that either. It raises some very relevant bio-medical ethics questions. I say relevant because they could be applied to different medical ethics today, and I don’t believe it is impossible that they may become relevant in a precisely similar way.
This novel satisfies the You or Me category (book with “you” or “me in the title) in the What’s in a Name 2023 Challenge.
The title is taken from the title of a song by real-life singer Judy Bridgewater. Kathy obtains a cassette tape of Bridgewater that includes the song. It resonates with Kathy, though she cannot explicitly explain why.
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