Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro's sixth novel, takes place in England during the 1990s and follows students' lives at an elite boarding school. The story explores themes of friendship, memories, and what it means to be human, gradually revealing deeper mysteries about the nature of their world. Ishiguro started writing Never Let Me Go in 1990.[3]
Plot
Kathy is a 31-year-old carer who has been looking after donors for 11 years, much longer than is typical. Permitted to choose some of the donors she cares for, she elects to support childhood friends. However, she has been informed that her caring role will end soon.
Kathy reminisces about her time at Hailsham, an elite boarding school located in an old country house where students are raised with minimal outside contact. Their guardians (teachers), led by Miss Elsie, emphasise the crucial importance of avoiding disease, and the production of expressive art. The students' best pieces are taken away by Madame for a mysterious gallery. Much is left unexplained, and the students speculate.
Kathy's schoolfriends include Ruth, a rather bossy girl, and Tommy, an isolated boy with poor artistic skills. Kathy listens often to her cassette tape. Dancing to "baby, never let me go" one day, Kathy sees Madame watching her and crying. When Kathy loses the tape, students joke that it has gone to Norfolk, where they half-believe all lost things end up. As the students grow older, Tommy and Ruth form a relationship.
Near the end of their time at Hailsham, Miss Lucy tells the students that she can no longer hide the truth: they have been created to donate their vital organs to others. Their futures are predetermined, and each will begin making donations upon reaching adulthood. Miss Lucy is removed from the school.
When the students are 16, they move to the Cottages, a halfway house. They are allowed to explore, and some learn to drive. Students move on to begin their training as carers or, if they wish, to start donating.
Having learned that they are clones, the students speculate about their originals. After one student spots a possible match for Ruth in Norfolk, a group take a trip there. On the way, they discuss a rumour that a couple who are truly in love can have their donations deferred for a few years. They find the possible match, but her resemblance to Ruth proves superficial. Tommy tells Kathy he wants to look for a copy of her lost tape, and together they search local shops. Having found a replacement, Tommy confesses his feelings for Kathy and explains his belief that Madame collected artwork to identify couples who were truly in love, recalling a guardian’s comment that students' art revealed their souls. He worries that he could never apply for deferral, having never produced any art good enough.
Kathy becomes a carer, and does not see her schoolfriends for about ten years. When she hears that Ruth's first donation has gone badly, Kathy applies to support her. Ruth regrets having kept Kathy and Tommy apart, and hands them Madame's address, urging them to seek a deferral even though Tommy has already donated three times. Donors almost always 'complete' (die) after the fourth donation. After Ruth completes unexpectedly, Kathy becomes Tommy's carer and they finally become a couple. They visit Madame's house to attempt to defer Tommy's final donation, taking new artwork from Tommy to demonstrate that they are genuinely in love.
Madame, as well as Miss Emily, who lives with her, are polite, but detached. Miss Emily is self-absorbed, with little interest in her visitors' state of mind. She explains that when clones were first created they were reared in awful conditions, and she had set up Hailsham as a more humane alternative. The students' art was taken to prove to the outside world that students truly had souls. The project was initially a success, but when public opinion turned against it the school was shut down. Miss Emily says that rumours of deferral were false, that many of today's students are still being raised in deplorable conditions, and that her visitors should appreciate how much she was able to secure for them. She seems to lose interest in the conversation, and leaves without saying goodbye.
Tommy's anger grows, and he asks for a new carer. After his completion and before her own first donation, Kathy drives to Norfolk and stares at a remote fence where windswept litter has collected, imagining this spot to be where everything she had known since childhood has ended up.
Title
Never Let Me Go shares its title with a song mentioned within the novel. Kathy treasures her cassette of the fictional album, Songs after Dark by Judy Bridgewater, which she purchased at a Hailsham sale. On one occasion, while dancing to the song's chorus, which again contains the title, she notices Madame watching her and crying. Madame explains the encounter when they meet at the end of the book: while Kathy explains that she was imagining herself holding and cherishing a child, Madame connects Kathy's behaviour with the loss of an "old kind world" due to technological innovation. In another section of the book, Kathy refers to the three main characters "letting each other go" after leaving the cottages.
Kathy – The protagonist and narrator of the novel. She is a 31-year-old clone who was raised to be an organ donor. During her childhood, Kathy is free-spirited, kind, and loving, and stands up for what is right. At the end of the novel, Kathy is a young woman who does not give away much emotion as she deeply contemplates her past. As an adult, she criticises people less and is accepting of the lives of her friends.
Tommy – A male donor and childhood friend of Kathy, uncreative and isolated at Hailsham. He has a bad temper and is the object of tricks played by the other children. Miss Lucy tells him it is okay not to be creative, giving him relief, but takes it back years later, making him a quiet and sad teenager. As he matures, Tommy becomes a young man who is generally calm and thoughtful, but retains his old spirit.
Ruth – A childhood friend of Kathy, Ruth is a female donor from Hailsham who is described by Kathy as bossy. At the start of the novel, she is a self-conscious extrovert with strong opinions who attempts to be the centre of social activities. Her hopes for the future are crushed as she processes that she was born to be a donor. Ruth undergoes a transformation to become a more aware person, thinking in greater depth. She becomes an adult who is deeply unhappy and regretful.
Minor characters
Madame (Marie-Claude) – A woman who visits Hailsham to collect the children's artwork. Described as a mystery by the students at Hailsham, she appears professional and stern, and a young Kathy describes her as distant and forbidding. The children are shocked to discover that she seems disgusted by them, but she weeps when she sees Kathy dance to a love song called "Never Let Me Go".
Miss Emily – Headmistress of Hailsham. She can be very sharp, according to Kathy. The children thought that she had an extra sense that allowed her to know where children were hiding.
Miss Lucy – A teacher at Hailsham with whom the children feel comfortable. She is one of the younger teachers at Hailsham and tells the students very frankly that they exist only for organ donation. She feels a lot of stress at Hailsham and is fired for what she tells the students.
Miss Geraldine – A teacher at Hailsham who works with younger students on their art.
Chrissie – A female donor, slightly older than the three main characters, joining them at the Cottages. She completes (dies because of her organ donations) before the book ends.
Rodney – Chrissie's boyfriend, the one who originally sees Ruth's possible, the person from whom Ruth might have been cloned, out in Norfolk. He and Chrissie are mentioned to have broken up before she completed.
Analysis
Ishiguro has stated that the novel began with a plot involving a nuclear bomb, but that he then began to wonder "what the 20th century might have looked like if the incredible developments that took place in nuclear physics, culminating in the creation of the atom and hydrogen bombs, had taken place instead in the field of biology, specifically in cloning".[6]
Ishiguro said he began writing the novel in the 1990s, without a clear idea of his intentions.[7] In 2001, listening to a radio broadcast on biotechnology, he suddenly decided to direct his new novel to deal with "the sadness of the human condition". He also proposed to deal with "some of the oldest questions in literature (…) 'What does it mean to be human?' 'What is the soul?' 'What is the purpose for which we've been created, and should we try to fulfill it?'"[7]
In Contemporary Literature, author Anne Whitehead highlights the novel's focus on healthcare as particularly thought-provoking, with Kathy's status as a "carer" defining much of her adult life. Whitehead writes, "[Kathy's] preoccupations with professional success and with minor inconsistencies in the system mean that she is not addressing either her own imminent death or the larger inequities and injustices at work," and wonders, "Is 'caring,' viewed in this light, a form of labor that is socially valuable because Kathy is making a positive difference to others (preventing 'agitation'), or—given the political resonances of Ishiguro's choice of word here—is it a means of preventing resistance and unrest?"[8]
John Mullan speculates that the novel's modern setting is "calculated to have a defamiliarizing effect. While this novel measures carefully the passing of time, its chronology, we soon realize, is removed from any historical reality that we can recognize".[9]
Reception
Critical reception
Louis Menand, in The New Yorker, described the novel as "quasi-science-fiction", saying, "even after the secrets have been revealed, there are still a lot of holes in the story [...] it's because, apparently, genetic science isn't what the book is about".[10] Sarah Kerr, in The New York Times, characterizes the novel's setup as "potentially dime-store-novel" and "an enormous gamble," but elaborates that "the theme of cloning lets [Ishiguro] push to the limit ideas he's nurtured in earlier fiction about memory and the human self; the school's hothouse seclusion makes it an ideal lab for his fascination with cliques, loyalty and friendship."[11]
Horror author Ramsey Campbell labeled it one of the best horror novels since 2000, a "classic instance of a story that's horrifying, precisely because the narrator doesn't think it is".[12]
Joseph O'Neill from The Atlantic suggested that the novel successfully fits into the coming of age genre. O'Neill writes that "Ishiguro's imagining of the children's misshapen little world is profoundly thoughtful, and their hesitant progression into knowledge of their plight is an extreme and heartbreaking version of the exodus of all children from the innocence in which the benevolent but fraudulent adult world conspires to place them".[13]
Theo Tait, a writer for The Daily Telegraph, wrote: "Gradually, it dawns on the reader that Never Let Me Go is a parable about mortality. The horribly indoctrinated voices of the Hailsham students who tell each other pathetic little stories to ward off the grisly truth about the future—they belong to us; we've been told that we're all going to die, but we've not really understood".[14]
In Japan 2014, the Horipro agency produced a stage adaptation, Watashi wo Hanasanaide (私を離さないで). Directors included Ken Yoshida, Takeyoshi Yamamoto, Yuichiro Hirakawa, and Akimi Yoshida.
A stage adaptation in English by Suzanne Heathcote was presented at the Rose Theatre Kingston in September 2024[21] and subsequently at other theatres in England.[22]
↑ Kato, Norihiro (1 March 2011). Emmerich, Michael (ed.). "Send in the Clones". The American Interest. Archived from the original on 25 June 2022. Retrieved 28 February 2023.
↑ Whitehead, Anne (Spring 2011). "Writing with Care: Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go"". Contemporary Literature. 52 (1): 54–88. doi:10.1353/cli.2011.0012.
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