By Gabrielle Nguyen
Kazuo Ishiguro paints a heartbreaking world in his novel Never Let Me Go set in England in the late 1990s. In it, Kathy H. and her peers grow up attending the secluded and mysterious Hailsham prep school. As they grow up, they receive enviable educations, but an air of wrongness permeates the school with its overemphasis of regular medical examinations and of nurturing creativity.
It is only with the conclusion of the first part of the novel that the true purpose behind Hailsham and its students is revealed: they are clones to be harvested for organs.
After their education, the students of Hailsham become carers, a rough equivalent to today’s physical therapists. Carers tend to donors after each donation back to health until it is time for another organ to be harvested.
Eventually, carers will retire and become donors themselves, at which point they are called upon for donations. The novel follows Kathy H. as she reminisces over her childhood with Ruth and Tommy and the lasting repercussions Hailsham had on their lives.
Throughout the entire novel, there is an atmosphere of an existential nightmare, and the pacing is smooth and steady, like an unfettered stream taking the audience along its current. Kathy H.’s narration is unguarded, as if the novel was her flow of thoughts with tangent storylines wandering into other tangents.
Her detached frankness adds an eeriness to the way she copes with her life, her friends’ lives and their disposability. Despite her aloofness, she values her heartbreakingly sentimental trinkets and her very real affections for Ruth and Tommy.
Ishiguro masterfully creates a dreamy and unsettling alternate universe. Although the premise of the novel is similar to Michael Bay’s movie, The Island, it is much more disturbing in that the students of Hailsham are harvested more than once, allowing for pain and recovery in between each donation, and their intelligence level is equal to that of any other normal human adult.
Never Let Me Go is not a summer beach read but a very thoughtful and resonant novel. It has been made into a movie starring Carey Mulligan as Kathy H. and Keira Knightley as Ruth, to be released on September 15, 2010, limited.