Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Summary
Kathy H., a thirty one year old carer, narrates her memories of growing up with Ruth and Tommy at Hailsham, an English boarding school that seems idyllic until the novel discloses, gradually and almost sideways, that Hailsham's students are clones raised for the sole purpose of donating their vital organs in early adulthood. The children absorb this fact the way real children absorb rules they never question, through half explained assemblies and one teacher's unauthorized outburst of honesty, and Ishiguro spends much of the book on ordinary adolescent concerns, friendship, jealousy, and a small art collection called the Gallery whose real purpose the students misunderstand for years. As adults, Kathy and Tommy pursue a rumor that couples who can prove they are truly in love may receive a temporary deferral from donation, and travel to find Miss Emily, one of Hailsham's former guardians, who confirms no such deferral ever existed and that Hailsham itself, a relatively humane experiment in treating clones as children with feelings, has already been shut down for lack of public support. Tommy completes his final donation and dies. The novel ends with Kathy alone at a fence in Norfolk, watching windblown litter collect against it and imagining, briefly and without real hope, that everything she has lost might one day wash up in the same place.
Ishiguro tells the entire premise in Kathy's restrained, elegiac first person voice, and that restraint is the whole method: neither Kathy nor anyone else in the book rebels against a fate the reader recognizes as monstrous, and the horror comes from watching characters accept quietly what a reader cannot. It reads slowly and rewards patience with an ending that lands harder for how little it raises its voice.
Historical Context & Significance
Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2005 and for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2006, and it won the American Library Association's Alex Award in 2006. The 2005 Booker went to John Banville's The Sea, a result settled by the chair's casting vote between those two books and one that Boyd Tonkin called possibly the most perverse decision in the history of the award, and Never Let Me Go has never won a Booker, a Pulitzer or a National Book Award of its own.
Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, an honor for his body of work rather than this specific novel, though the Swedish Academy's citation said that in novels of great emotional force he had uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world. Time magazine named it the best novel of 2005 and later placed it on its list of the hundred best English language novels since 1923. A 2010 film starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley brought the novel to a wider audience without matching its critical reception.