sweet crusades: "Never Let Me Go"

OPENING LINE

My name is Kathy H.

CLOSING LINE

I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.

I recently read “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro. This book would be prime evidence to my readaholic tendencies (unlike with the last book I read, "The Happiness Project") as I devoured it within a week. It’s an intriguing read, somewhat slow, but purposefully so. The reader is left to piece together the coming-of-age memories of the 1^st person narrator and deduce what is going on and what her reality is. It is a book focused on relationships and social interactions and behaviours, specifically within a group of 3 friends who have grown up together and their experience within a larger science-fiction-like experience. Essentially, without giving anything quite away, you come to realize what these characters are and you are horrified. But you are not horrified in an outwardly shocking or fearful way, because they’re monsters or zombies or aliens or anything like that. You become horrified when you discover what they are because what they are is not that far off from the realm of possibility in the actual world we live in. And mostly because they are not that far off or different from you or I. The world she describes in the novel is one that could easily be a parallel reality to our own. The science fiction is not so science-fiction-y and that is what makes it horrifying. That it is completely and totally possible.

Screw it –SPOILER ALERT!!!!! (however if you plan on still reading this book, knowing what the characters are won’t quite ruin it for you, it’s still a great read)...

SO, the characters in the book are a group of genetically engineered or test-tube children (clones if you will), bred to become “donors” to the regular or “real” humans. Essentially they were created to eventually be dissected (“donate” their essential organs) and die at a young age. However, this is never explicitly detailed in the book, nor is it blatantly stated. The only reference to the whole process is through the word “donations”; it is very vague. And that is because it is very vague to the book’s narrator Kathy H. herself. But it becomes clearer what they are as you go on, in a slow and methodically realized way. The way the reader finds out about the characters’ situation and unravels the mystery of their reality is the same way that the characters find out. It’s very sheltered and unspecific, and you just sort of eventually know, without ever being told outright.

The characters, while technically freaks of nature, are really actually humans themselves, and that’s how you come to think and feel about them, because they themselves think and feel – this is due in total part to the narration of Kathy H.- she thinks and feels no differently than you or I. Her experiences with her friends and other individuals are no different than our own social interactions and experiences. The book is divided into the 3 life stages of the donors (also human stages of growth and developed existence), from childhood where they were “raised” in a comfortable boarding house in the English countryside called Hailsham, to adolescence where they live in halfway-house type complexes called Cottages and begin to learn to assimilate with the real world, to early adulthood where they first must become carers (and take care of existing donors through their donations) until they themselves become donors and “complete” (the way they refer to death).

That cold unfeeling sterile term for death is frightening in itself because of it’s passivity. The characters know their fate yet they don’t rebel, they just choose to accept it. There is never any mention of trying to escape or run away into the real world. I found that part very hard to come to terms with, especially when 2 of the characters were very much in love and yet never were able to realize a fulfilled life of love together. I was almost surprised that they didn’t run off into the sunset together and live happily ever after. But this is a not a happily ever after tale, it is heartbreaking and cruel ultimately. Don’t expect to be satisfied with the ending, there is no silver lining. Death is all there is.

But I guess that can be a commentary on human existence, on all our existences and ultimate fates. In the end, death is all there is. We can’t fight it, can’t rebel against it, when doomsday comes, it comes, it waits for no one. In the end, so too do we have to accept our eventual “completion”.

That being said, the whole book is a commentary on our collective human existence, it’s a parallel view of our own present world while using a science-fiction framework to shed light on ordinary human life and emotions and feeling and memory. Even the science fiction setting is a commentary on our humanity, the clone issue being a moral and mortal one that is scarily not something that seems so foreign or impossible (and the potential real-life soulful implications as addressed in this book even scarier). This idea, the big moral cloning issue at the core, funnily enough is not really addressed in that context at all in the book. I guess that would probably be a whole other book anyway!

All in all, the book was a great read, and much needed after the pathetically slow trudge through my previous read. There was also recently a movie based on this book and I look forward to seeing that as well, although (as is usually the case) the movie probably won’t quite live up to the book.

Here is the trailer: