The Quiet Dystopian Horror of Never Let Me Go

*Big spoilers ahead, so venture forth at your own peril*

There is always something of a journey when reading a novel, as your enjoyment rises and falls, your appreciation for the writing or construction of plot waxes and wanes, and your realization of what the writer is doing sharpens and blurs.  If charted on a graph, my experience reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go would show several turns as my expectations were met and subverted and my understanding of how the novel fit into and broke out of its generic conventions came into focus.

I had never read anything by Ishiguro, but whenever I mentioned that Never Let Me Go was on my reading list I only ever heard good things, little gasps of excitement for me to read the book, so I entered the novel with raised expectations.  It quickly became clear to me with talk of donations and Hailsham that there was a bit of science fiction at the root of the novel, and I was intrigued further.  The writing, while not breathtaking, was strong and compelling.  I liked the tone and the pacing and was excited to learn more about where this was going.  The line on the graph was moving up.  Early on I began to suspect that Kathy and her friends were clones who were created for the sake of providing body parts to other citizens, and this suspicion was confirmed 80 pages or so into the novel.  Great, now the book looked to belong more to dystopian fiction than to the larger genre of science fiction.  At some point in the second part of the book, while the kids were at the Cottages and chasing down Ruth’s possible, it became clear to me that the casual pacing of the first section was going to remain throughout the novel, that Ishiguro was not going to be turning this into a tale of adventure at any point.  At first I was disappointed, pointing that line on the graph down, not because I don’t enjoy introspective literature, but because the tropes and conventions of science fiction and dystopian fiction that I was expecting were not present.  It seemed that the setting was merely a backdrop to tell the story of these three friends.  I did not expect any revelations to come at the end to surprise the reader, to make the reader reconsider what had come before—it was what it was.  I felt us building at some point to a meeting with Madame, but I didn’t know what we could possibly gain from the encounter.

I was of course foolish.  That encounter took a thought and a feeling that had been growing for 200-some pages, brought them into sharp focus, and illuminated them with horror.  Before that, I was aware that we were watching the movements of a friendship under impossible conditions, as all three knew their fate was to eventually donate up to four donations and then die.  How does friendship and human interaction mean anything with certain death sitting on the horizon?  You will be separated from your friends.  You will be isolated in either your work as a carer or your role as a donor.  You will not have meaningful dreams about what life might be like.  Kathy makes for an amazing lens to experience this story, and like hers, our understanding of their future is never really clear.  We know what’s going to happen, but we don’t really know how it will come about, what the system will be, why it will happen and in what way.  Like the kids at Hailsham we are both told and not told, and like the kids in Hailsham, we accept it without fighting back. 

What is so amazing about the encounter with Madame and Miss Emily is that it is our first extended interaction with a non-clone.  The chilliness of their perspective is full of quiet horror.  They wanted to prove that clones were human, that they had souls.  They wanted to prove that you could give clones a quality of life even as they fulfilled their duty.  There is simultaneously a tenderness and a coldness in their attitude.  Never did they challenge the assumption that this swath of humanity had to be sacrificed so that other could get a kidney transplant or a new liver.  They accepted the premise of a clone’s function.  They were merely more humanitarian murderers.  The difference, never stated outright in the book, is like having humanely treated free-range chickens instead of piling them all on top of each other in an industrial chicken farm—only we’re doing that with humans instead of chickens.

You can feel the line on my graph swooping up and up.  Never Let Me Go is unlike any other dystopian novel I’ve read in terms of its focus.  In most dystopian fiction, the author is concerned with the system of oppression, the way the state exerts its power and makes the populace comply, willingly or otherwise.  There are no slogans in Never Let Me Go.  The schooling is not a time of convincing the kids that they make the noblest sacrifice for the good of society.  Similarly, there is no point in which our protagonists buck against the system or call its existence into question.  There is always an acceptance that this is how it is, even as Ruth dreams of working in an office.  There is talk of how instruction worked at Hailsham so that the kids both knew and didn’t know what lay ahead, but as becomes clear from the final conversation with Miss Emily, that was not a deviant plot, but just the way it worked out.  Perhaps the scientists who invented cloning found a way to breed docility into the clones in the same way it bred sterility, but that is never discussed. Ishiguro is not interested in those details, and in some ways to focus on that stuff would actively distract from the story he’s telling, a story about friends with no future.

The clones, or students as they are called at Hailsham, are representative of every class of people that are necessary to the functioning of society but whose contributions are always downplayed or ignored.  Unwelcome immigrants, the working poor who fuel the machine of industry with their life’s blood, the slaves on whose back a country’s prosperity was built—all of these people have been viewed by those who benefit from, nay rely upon, their labor as less than human.   We cannot justify the horrid conditions of their lives if they are human, and the clones are the same way.  No one would sign their own son or daughter up for the life of a clone, a mere vessel to hold organs until they are needed by someone else.  They must be considered sub-human for the system to work.  But we, the readers, only find out about the sub-human status of clones in that final conversation with Miss Emily, because we have been in Kathy’s mind the whole time, and Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are of course entirely human.  One of Ishiguro’s strengths is breaking down the emotion and motives of characters within a scene.  Kathy gets irritated and mad, but she always comes round to seeing things from different perspectives.  Ruth is certainly a bully to Kathy, but Kathy always understands in the end the impulses for Ruth’s bullying and even seeks to protect Ruth.  Kathy’s sympathy and empathy are near superhuman, not sub-human.  The novel makes a big deal about what is said and not said, made explicit or left implicit, and Kathy is an observer of signs and meaning.  It is the very trait that undoubtedly makes her a good carer.  And it is this very trait that makes the novel a bittersweet tale.  The only explosions of anger come from Tommy, and Kathy hypothesizes that perhaps he had those tantrums because he knew the truth in a way that everyone else didn’t.  In that hypothesis, Kathy and Ishiguro point out that the reasonable response to this system is one of violence and outrage, but that is not a response we ever see.  There is only acceptance.  As a reader, I found myself understanding that acceptance and contemplating . . .  well, contemplating everything I have written here.

How did you accept that acceptance?  I feel like Ishiguro wanted to put his reader into a contemplative mindset, to think about these things without anger and outrage.  There is not call to burn down a broken system.  There is a push to consider the humanity of those at the bottom of the social power structure.  Because of course, the world of Never Let Me Go is a world of fiction, but it is also an analogue for our world.

In the end I have incredible respect for what Ishiguro has created here, and I find there is a lot to chew on, which is how I like my novels.  And it is, I believe, a brave and risky novel.  Watching kids grow up who are destined to die is in the end every bit as dark as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I think is a good novel of comparison, but I will not elaborate further here.   

Never Let Me Go is the final book on my list of 100, and it is a great way to sign off the project.