Never Let Me Go - Review
A tale of two covers
The first time I encountered Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel ‘Never Let Me Go’, I was in a hurry. I had to buy a gift for a friend and was running out of time. I remember stopping to look at the book and knowing that it was supposed to be good by some measure or the other but being unsure. The cover - the face of a young girl, with the corny four-worded title running across her face was enough to spook my then puny lit-bro brain and I judged against it, instead buying Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.
Few years later, I was in Blossoms in Bangalore and this time in a starkly different predicament - there were too many good books and too much time. It was then that I saw Never Let Me Go, a refreshing deep blue in a sea of Penguin whites, yellows and oranges. The new cover, with a small cassette tape on it, was so pretty that I knew that the book would be a worthy possession even if left unread. Now interestingly, this story which I often like to recount (no doubt because of its specious profundity) is not unlike the stories that Kathy, the narrator of the book, shares with us. Stories of no apparent significance forced into some meaningfulness by the sheer will of the storyteller. Never Let Me Go begins with Kathy, a ‘carer’, looking back at her school days. She goes into intricate detail about minor squabbles and seemingly unimportant incidents involving her friends Ruth and Tommy. Through Kathy we also learn what the grown-up versions of the trio think about the same incidents many years down the line, relying on our unreliable narrator and Ishiguro, that all these stories will be important or lead up to ‘something big’. Kathy jumps in and out of the present as she gives us bits and pieces of her life at Hailsham, an elite school for special children. Ishiguro here excels at what Hemingway dubbed the ‘Iceberg method’ - the idea that readers should not be spoon-fed details and be given only the tip of the iceberg.
We eventually discover that Hailsham is not a normal school and Kathy, Ruth, Tommy and all their friends with similar British names like Laura H. and Harry C., are not normal as well (and not just because they are British). We learn more and more about their world as Ishiguro packages each disturbing detail of his dystopian setting with stories of childhood innocence. In all of Kathy’s memories, Hailsham looms over like a large tree giving the kids shade and keeping them in the shadows. Their curriculum emphasizes art, poetry and literature. Their creativity is prioritized - with their best works selected for the prestigious ‘Gallery’, by the mysterious Madame. The secret behind their unique schooling and the world outside remains an imposing elephant in the room. But the book, which won the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel, is not bound by the tropes and limitations that the dystopian genre usually brings with itself. There is no fabricated sense of urgency or dread. Our characters live mostly in the past - analyzing conversations that they had with people they no longer hear from. There are no desperate calls for action, no battle cries against the system, just long sighs and many many strolls down memory lane. In Ishiguro’s novel, a fatalistic gloominess pervades everything. There are no stakes. It’s not life or death. Just life.
In search of lost times
Like any good story, Never Let Me Go is about many things - love, friendship, mortality and of course memory and the past. Kathy’s time is spent driving from one clinic to another across England, and on these drives, she still searches for the now long-gone Hailsham, happy even to catch a glimpse of something resembling it. She muses on her school life incessantly and - if I am allowed one bad joke per article - never lets go of it. But this desperate attachment to her past is not a mere painkiller. In Ishiguro’s dark future, it is the only way people like Kathy learn to live. To prepare for, if not delay, the inevitable. To remember a time of smooth sailing when things seemed possible, when the winds were kind(er) and the future a far-off island. As Kathy, Ruth and Tommy sit together to intently watch a boat that has drifted to the shore, their littoral melancholia seeps through the pages and reminds us of all those times when we too had to rely on crutches of nostalgia. Our protagonists, though subjected to extraordinary and impersonal cruelty, are no different from the large masses of ordinary people who have quietly learnt to replace their dreams with bittersweet nostalgia.
Not with a bang but a whisper
As mentioned earlier, all the mazy tangents the narrator leads one through do not reveal much more in the way of shocking worldly details than what’s clearly established early on. The shadow of what’s to come looms over the reader as much as it does over the character. As you anticipatorily flip through, the weight of the realisation that there is nothing more to it, no ex machina, no twist, and yet is an acceptable end for our protagonist is what delivers a gut punch. The book requires no complex explanation as in its simplicity it has conveyed so much, distilling the essence of a grim dystopia and delivering it in a manner that is simultaneously chilling, melancholic and mundane.
Another rather accusatory but substantiated message from the book is our ability to normalise horrors for the “greater good” or more appropriately, greater convenience. Self-righteous characters propping themselves up on a moral high ground because they see the evil, hear no difference between treating the symptoms and the cause, and speak like they aren’t complicit in an inhumane system they refuse to oppose, are, to me, a depressing representation of our times. One must think that surely an ordinary person in this world, knowing what they know, would be unable to live with themselves - conscience hammering away at them to do what’s right. It hurts to use a word like ‘conditioning’ but I suppose it does describe what those ordinary people and ourselves have been subject to. It could explain why we so easily get used to injustice, violence and cruelty in this world. We learn to look away. And to ignore those who are trying to make us see. After all, bad things happen all the time, especially to other people.
It goes without saying that the book, a modern day classic, is a recommended read. But despite its devastatingly final and hopeless ending, it leaves some people wanting more. It is perfectly understandable if you find this sort of fiction to be dull and lacking the dramatic climax that we all deserve. (Then again, is it really fiction if systematic horrors are normalised to the point that people learn to live around them?) So, if you want to read about teenagers waging war against a dystopian system, and with no British people, you should check out The Hunger Games.
