Never Let Me Go – again

I’ve been thinking about this one a lot, lately.

I first read this around when I turned sixteen, and made nothing of it. The prose was strikingly flat and lifeless, the book’s events pedestrian, the plot twist simultaneously contrived and understated. I complained about all this to my tutor at school, a man my parents’ age, who then told me that the book had moved him deeply. I forget if he said it made him cry.

But as I say, this book keeps coming up in my mind lately. As a hot take in conversation in with friends (‘I really didn’t think Never Let Me Go was that good … !’), and because the whole experience of university increasingly reminds me of the middle portion of the book, where the characters spend their late teens living in some cottages out in the middle of nowhere, between leaving school and facing the macabre reality of adulthood, spending their days reading literature on the grass, fucking each other, and living in idyllic unease about their past, present, and future.

This week I revisited Never Let Me Go, via the audiobook read by Kerry Fox.

Wow. I kind of see why Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize.

Book recap. – These are spoilers, but I almost think that knowing them beforehand heightens one’s appreciation of how Ishiguro interweaves memory and foreknowledge, dystopia and humanity.

The book is narrated by Kathy, framed as her reminiscences. The main characters are her, Ruth, and Tommy. Most of the book is about them navigating their relationships with each other, in those complicated, deep, and sometimes ugly ways that we deal with relationships that ‘go way back’. In the first third of the book, the three of them grow up together at a boarding school, playing, chatting, vying, conspiring, whatever else that children do. In the middle third, they leave school and live in those cottages that I described earlier, and become acquainted with the outside world. We gradually find out that Kathy, Ruth, Tommy, and all their schoolmates are clones created for the sole purpose of becoming organ donors for ‘normal people’. In the last third of the book, Ruth and Tommy gradually donate their organs and die; Kathy nurses them, in the lead-up to her own donations. The characters find out, devastatingly, that their school and childhood had been part of a humanitarian movement trying to convince a hostile society that clones are also human beings.

When I first read this – exactly four years ago now, four lifetimes – I took issue with a) the narrative voice and b) the plot content. So let’s now reassess both of those two things.

the narrative voice

The prose style works when it’s read out loud. It’s straightforward and pared-back like how people actually speak. Short phrases, few adjectives. Kerry Fox, my audiobook narrator, reads in posh, mumbling kind of voice, which I think works oddly well for Kathy. I still think the same sentences would read as choppy and ungainly on paper, but I accept now that they are intended to sound conversational.

A related thing – Kathy’s lack of character. Both Ruth and Tommy have quite strong characters, but Kathy is just … utterly neutral. She’s clearly a capable, sensible, and inquisitive person, but these traits barely chug along in the background, and she is resolutely featureless amid the deadpan prose.

I still think that about Kathy, but I think it’s not a bad thing for a book like this. As the point-of-view character, of course Kathy’s neutral. Of course she is default and unremarkable and taken for granted – she’s the one telling the story. I think the audiobook performance does a lot in making sense of this, for Kathy’s muted character to feel more like a candid first-person representation and less like she’s just badly written.

But also, Kathy’s neutrality makes her universal. Kathy’s experiences at boarding school and living with no responsibilities are kind of niche, but how she speaks about piecing memories together, tracing unspoken agreements between close friends, observing the unthinking cruelties children enact upon each other, being in the childhood limbo between knowledge and ignorance, growing up into a big bad world where people hate you without wanting to try get to know you… Kathy speaks to some very universal themes and experiences, and her neutrality as a narrator makes the boundary between narrator and reader ever more porous.

the plot content

I now think this novel is about relationships, memory, growing up, education and knowledge (about the world, rather than academics), duty of care, and living in a society steeped in prejudice. One of the most interesting questions I took away is about privilege, how some things that are considered a privilege should really be a right.

Aged 16, I thought it was about a love triangle, stuffed between lots of mundane everyday life things. Well, yes, it’s still about those things. The love triangle I still find mediocre – it comes out of nowhere, and making True Love the central plot point of a book is hackneyed and lazy (cue rant re amatonormativity). But people were right about the mundane life things: these are what make the book so transcendently perceptive and personal. The way Kathy delves back to provide the context to some tiny in-joke, or how she tries to place events in time by ordering them with each other… Through Kathy’s narrative, Ishiguro has made memory corporeal – less memory as an object, more memory as an activity.

I do think the last third of the book is the weakest, the part set in the characters’ adult years, and featuring the reveal that, all along, their society has been debating their personhood. The earlier sections are heavy with reflection and richness and wisdom, whereas this last part feels mercenary, ferrying the characters from one location to another so the final plot points can happen. I think Ishiguro could have milked the plot twist a bit more, spent more time dwelling on the characters’ dehumanised status in their society. I also think the love quest is trite – see above re the love triangle. But then there are in-universe explanations for both of these – the notion that they might not be full human beings is so absurd to the characters that they find the notion incomprehensible; the love quest is a rumour made plausible by desperation.

In all, go listen to this. First two thirds get 5 out of 5, last third gets 3.