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 notified 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.
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". [7] 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." [8]
Horror author Ramsey Campbell labelled 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". [9]
Joseph O'Neill from The Atlantic suggested that the novel successfully fits into the coming of age genre. O'Neill wrote 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". [10]
Theo Tait 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". [11]
In Contemporary Literature , Anne Whitehead considered the novel's focus on healthcare to be particularly thought-provoking, with Kathy's status as a carer defining much of her adult life. Whitehead wrote, "[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." She wondered, "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?" [12]
John Mullan said 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". [13]
Awards and lists
In 2019, the novel ranked 4th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. [14] In 2024, the novel ranked 9th on the New York Times list of its 100 best books of the 21st century. [15]
