NEVER LET ME GO, by Kazuo Ishiguro

AM's Writing > NEVER LET ME GO, Kazuo Ishiguro NEVER LET ME GO, by Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005 © 2021, A. Mead
	[I wrote this article as an addendum to Sarah Kerr's unusually insightful review in NY Times, April 17, 2005: "Never_Let_Me_Go: When They Were Orphans." She unravels many threads of its deeper intent that remain opaque to most commentators and reviewers. There's an even more subtle subtext, probably intentional though possibly subliminal (for the author), that Kerr did not mention. It seems that its narrative style (harkening back to female-narrated novels of the early 19th Century) and story elements (anchored firmly in its horrifically warped English ambience), suggest that the author, bringing the cultural perspective of an immigrant, is calling into question some aspects of English traditional values.] N.B. Neither Kerr's essay nor this addendum to it should be read before you have explored the novel on your own. Ishiguro, to an interviewer [Guardian, Feb. 2, 2005]: "There are things I'm more interested in than the clone thing ...". The story quickly reveals ethical anomalies in this alternative 1990's Britain, that readers must find puzzling and troubling. Their perplexity can only deepen as the novel proceeds. How can hundreds of bright, well-read, emotionally engaged, self-aware young adults, NOT substantially challenge, and rebel against their sacrificial fate? Further, how could this kind-hearted, post-war English society -- having recently quashed human medical experiments in Germany, banned circus animal acts (!) and time-honoured fox hunts (!), funded universal medical treatment for all citizens -- possibly condone cloning, then growing these youngsters to adulthood to provide (eventually lethal) organ donations to others. Why not massive public outrage? Clearly the "clone thing" is the axis, the pivot point for everything that happens in the novel. So if it's not Ishiguro's real concern, what is? Perhaps the strange irony of kindly, humane Brit society tolerating the humanistically abhorrent "clone thing" is pointing to particular elements of the national character that the author wants us to reconsider? INSULARITY -- British Islanders, for centuries, still to some extent, and inherited by their American offspring, felt theirs was the center of world culture. Kathy H., our 31 year old narrator, grew to adulthood in the elite 'boarding school,' Hailsham. She tells her story as if to a would-be close confidante, someone who would be aware of the clone program, though not in such detail as she will personally relate. Like Austen's Emma, Kathy is totally unconcerned with the larger society's difficulties; she's closely focussed on her own feelings and situational issues, especially her relationships to peers and guardians at Hailsham. Her concerns are inward, about herself, friends, their little rivalries and intimacies. Like Austen's young ladies, she's intensely interested in what others say and think about her and her closest companions. Worldly moral/ethical values, spiritual, philosophical matters, legal, political, environmental issues -- just aren't part of her world. Kathy and her friends at Hailsham naturally have some curiosity about the world outside, but feel little need to engage with it actively. Even after leaving her insular boarding school, when Kathy's out in the countryside working as a "carer", she has absolutely nothing to say about anyone or any thing outside the little sphere of her work and strained ties to childhood friends, Ruth, Tommy, and few others! STRATIFICATION -- much of Kathy's story is recollected from grade school at Hailsham, where grounds were laid for her later donor care work and lasting personal relations with Ruth and Tommy. Grade school's clearly delineated layers, faintly prefigures the pervasive class strata of Brit society, still casting a shadow into the 1960's when she was a child, and the 1990's when she's telling her story. Hailsham students learn from childhood how their purified upbringing is essential for their special role when they grow up. Kathy later discovers that she and Hailsham peers were a privileged stratum within the donor 'class'; most donors evidently endured much more brutal conditions. There seem to be strata within strata -- subtleties totally familiar to the 19th century writer and reader. PEER SOLIDARITY -- Where stratification by caste (India) or class (England) deeply inform social structure, your identity, values, expectations, come predefined in the traditions of your stratum. The family for most, Hailsham for Kathy & friends, shapes how you live and think, where you feel at home, with whom you belong. In traditional cultures, few felt any need to reach beyond the boundaries assigned to their clan, caste, or class. Instead of grating against these limits, traditional tribal people found security in belonging and conforming. One of the worst possible punishments was exile. Like characters of a 19th Century novel, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, rarely question the limits of their assigned place in society, instead, find comfort and purpose in living within it, acceptingly, with the people who matter, their peers. PRIDE & PROPRIETY -- In Ishiguro's earlier novel, Remains_of_the_Day, set in 1950's Britain, the aging butler of an aristocrat's formerly grand house, reflects on his life and work. Taking great pride, always seeking to excel in his role as loyal servant, he is yet a sadly limited character, unable to relate closely to others, detached from his own feelings. His strong sense of socially defined propriety, belonging to a respectable class with clearly defined expectations, provides him a secure identity, goals for his life. He has no aspiration to stray beyond his proper place in the world. The organ-donor cohorts in Never_Let_Me_Go are raised from infancy to fulfill an assigned role. It does not seem to occur to them to escape this assignment. [Yes, Tommy and Kathy eventually explore the rumored possibility of temporary 'deferral', to enjoy their young love a little longer; but when told the rumor's false, after some brief upset, they sadly accept it.] LIMITATION, LOSS (ACCOMMODATION TO) -- the Britain of a century before this novel unfolds was large, worldwide, powerful, prosperous. The two World Wars, loss of the colonies, and economic shifts deflated the Empire, bankrupted most of the grand houses, weakened traditional class-based instituions and high standards of propriety. Of course, if we believe in the wonders of Modernity and Progress, we can totally discount nostalgia over those losses. But both novels, Remains_of_the_Day and Never_Let_Me_Go, center on characters who fully embodied their socially defined roles within insular strata -- not really even perceiving them as limiting. Rather, they take pride in doing their roles well. Like most of us, Kathy and friends miss the comraderie of their young lives together -- even though they know, on some level, that Hailsham and the Cottages were created and tasked to cultivate them for eventually fatal organ donations! Both novels being set in an explicitly English milieu allows these motifs (inward focus, class identification, accepting its limits ...) to play out in their characters within the context of parallel developments in society. These shifts in core [personal \| social] values have complex, ambiguous consequences at both levels. Both novels can be seen as an (immigrant) outsider's critique -- that from a modern perspective some of Britain's proud traditions seem backward, inhumane, unfairly limiting. But both novels' characters found comforts and purpose within those limits; they are fully grounded in their assigned identities, as were most people until very modern times. In traditional cultures worldwide, children grew up firmly embedded in their tribe's habits, home-lands, religious doctrines -- myths and symbols passed down to them from past generations. Though less deeply perhaps, the modern child still absorbs his identity from the environs, becomes personally defined by its values, comfortable in its beliefs and manners, devoted to family and the land where he feels 'at home.' Most now will also feel the pull of modernity, offering freedom, material prosperity, fewer limits on their potential as an individual. But both traditional and modern ways have their own complications; these ambivalences thoroughly permeate both Ishiguro novels. While both play out in mid-20th century England, and seem to have particularly pointed reference to features of that culture, the issues raised apply much more widely, as Sarah Kerr's 2005 review discusses. The characters in Never_Let_Me_Go embody these human universals: the little struggles of childhood, trying to define who they are, what they care about, imagined (and real) secret plots, scary things unseen. Then, teenage groping with sexual confusion and insecurity, trying to imagine their future; messily merging into the complex adult world. Then in later life, softening anxieties, accepting what one has done; also regretting lost opportunities, mistakes made, the hurt we've caused others. Reflecting on what we're proud of, and not -- filtered by forgetfulness, rendering it all fuzzier, less chaotic than it probably was. Ishiguro's popularity across cultures stems from his masterfully crafted stories touching so poignantly these commonly felt dilemmas between attachment and freedom. Email comments to vamead@well.com. AM's Writing > NEVER LET ME GO

AM's Writing > NEVER LET ME GO, Kazuo Ishiguro

NEVER LET ME GO, by Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005

[I wrote this article as an addendum to Sarah Kerr's unusually insightful review in NY Times, April 17, 2005: "Never_Let_Me_Go: When They Were Orphans." She unravels many threads of its deeper intent that remain opaque to most commentators and reviewers. There's an even more subtle subtext, probably intentional though possibly subliminal (for the author), that Kerr did not mention. It seems that its narrative style (harkening back to female-narrated novels of the early 19th Century) and story elements (anchored firmly in its horrifically warped English ambience), suggest that the author, bringing the cultural perspective of an immigrant, is calling into question some aspects of English traditional values.]

N.B. Neither Kerr's essay nor this addendum to it should be read before you have explored the novel on your own.

Ishiguro, to an interviewer [Guardian, Feb. 2, 2005]: "There are things I'm more interested in than the clone thing ...".

The story quickly reveals ethical anomalies in this alternative 1990's Britain, that readers must find puzzling and troubling. Their perplexity can only deepen as the novel proceeds. How can hundreds of bright, well-read, emotionally engaged, self-aware young adults, NOT substantially challenge, and rebel against their sacrificial fate? Further, how could this kind-hearted, post-war English society -- having recently quashed human medical experiments in Germany, banned circus animal acts (!) and time-honoured fox hunts (!), funded universal medical treatment for all citizens -- possibly condone cloning, then growing these youngsters to adulthood to provide (eventually lethal) organ donations to others. Why not massive public outrage? Clearly the "clone thing" is the axis, the pivot point for everything that happens in the novel. So if it's not Ishiguro's real concern, what is? Perhaps the strange irony of kindly, humane Brit society tolerating the humanistically abhorrent "clone thing" is pointing to particular elements of the national character that the author wants us to reconsider?

INSULARITY -- British Islanders, for centuries, still to some extent, and inherited by their American offspring, felt theirs was the center of world culture. Kathy H., our 31 year old narrator, grew to adulthood in the elite 'boarding school,' Hailsham. She tells her story as if to a would-be close confidante, someone who would be aware of the clone program, though not in such detail as she will personally relate. Like Austen's Emma, Kathy is totally unconcerned with the larger society's difficulties; she's closely focussed on her own feelings and situational issues, especially her relationships to peers and guardians at Hailsham. Her concerns are inward, about herself, friends, their little rivalries and intimacies. Like Austen's young ladies, she's intensely interested in what others say and think about her and her closest companions. Worldly moral/ethical values, spiritual, philosophical matters, legal, political, environmental issues -- just aren't part of her world. Kathy and her friends at Hailsham naturally have some curiosity about the world outside, but feel little need to engage with it actively. Even after leaving her insular boarding school, when Kathy's out in the countryside working as a "carer", she has absolutely nothing to say about anyone or any thing outside the little sphere of her work and strained ties to childhood friends, Ruth, Tommy, and few others!

STRATIFICATION -- much of Kathy's story is recollected from grade school at Hailsham, where grounds were laid for her later donor care work and lasting personal relations with Ruth and Tommy. Grade school's clearly delineated layers, faintly prefigures the pervasive class strata of Brit society, still casting a shadow into the 1960's when she was a child, and the 1990's when she's telling her story. Hailsham students learn from childhood how their purified upbringing is essential for their special role when they grow up. Kathy later discovers that she and Hailsham peers were a privileged stratum within the donor 'class'; most donors evidently endured much more brutal conditions. There seem to be strata within strata -- subtleties totally familiar to the 19th century writer and reader.

PEER SOLIDARITY -- Where stratification by caste (India) or class (England) deeply inform social structure, your identity, values, expectations, come predefined in the traditions of your stratum. The family for most, Hailsham for Kathy & friends, shapes how you live and think, where you feel at home, with whom you belong. In traditional cultures, few felt any need to reach beyond the boundaries assigned to their clan, caste, or class. Instead of grating against these limits, traditional tribal people found security in belonging and conforming. One of the worst possible punishments was exile. Like characters of a 19th Century novel, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, rarely question the limits of their assigned place in society, instead, find comfort and purpose in living within it, acceptingly, with the people who matter, their peers.

PRIDE & PROPRIETY -- In Ishiguro's earlier novel, Remains_of_the_Day, set in 1950's Britain, the aging butler of an aristocrat's formerly grand house, reflects on his life and work. Taking great pride, always seeking to excel in his role as loyal servant, he is yet a sadly limited character, unable to relate closely to others, detached from his own feelings. His strong sense of socially defined propriety, belonging to a respectable class with clearly defined expectations, provides him a secure identity, goals for his life. He has no aspiration to stray beyond his proper place in the world. The organ-donor cohorts in Never_Let_Me_Go are raised from infancy to fulfill an assigned role. It does not seem to occur to them to escape this assignment. [Yes, Tommy and Kathy eventually explore the rumored possibility of temporary 'deferral', to enjoy their young love a little longer; but when told the rumor's false, after some brief upset, they sadly accept it.]

LIMITATION, LOSS (ACCOMMODATION TO) -- the Britain of a century before this novel unfolds was large, worldwide, powerful, prosperous. The two World Wars, loss of the colonies, and economic shifts deflated the Empire, bankrupted most of the grand houses, weakened traditional class-based instituions and high standards of propriety. Of course, if we believe in the wonders of Modernity and Progress, we can totally discount nostalgia over those losses. But both novels, Remains_of_the_Day and Never_Let_Me_Go, center on characters who fully embodied their socially defined roles within insular strata -- not really even perceiving them as limiting. Rather, they take pride in doing their roles well. Like most of us, Kathy and friends miss the comraderie of their young lives together -- even though they know, on some level, that Hailsham and the Cottages were created and tasked to cultivate them for eventually fatal organ donations!

Both novels being set in an explicitly English milieu allows these motifs (inward focus, class identification, accepting its limits ...) to play out in their characters within the context of parallel developments in society. These shifts in core [personal | social] values have complex, ambiguous consequences at both levels. Both novels can be seen as an (immigrant) outsider's critique -- that from a modern perspective some of Britain's proud traditions seem backward, inhumane, unfairly limiting. But both novels' characters found comforts and purpose within those limits; they are fully grounded in their assigned identities, as were most people until very modern times.

In traditional cultures worldwide, children grew up firmly embedded in their tribe's habits, home-lands, religious doctrines -- myths and symbols passed down to them from past generations. Though less deeply perhaps, the modern child still absorbs his identity from the environs, becomes personally defined by its values, comfortable in its beliefs and manners, devoted to family and the land where he feels 'at home.' Most now will also feel the pull of modernity, offering freedom, material prosperity, fewer limits on their potential as an individual. But both traditional and modern ways have their own complications; these ambivalences thoroughly permeate both Ishiguro novels. While both play out in mid-20th century England, and seem to have particularly pointed reference to features of that culture, the issues raised apply much more widely, as Sarah Kerr's 2005 review discusses.

The characters in Never_Let_Me_Go embody these human universals: the little struggles of childhood, trying to define who they are, what they care about, imagined (and real) secret plots, scary things unseen. Then, teenage groping with sexual confusion and insecurity, trying to imagine their future; messily merging into the complex adult world. Then in later life, softening anxieties, accepting what one has done; also regretting lost opportunities, mistakes made, the hurt we've caused others. Reflecting on what we're proud of, and not -- filtered by forgetfulness, rendering it all fuzzier, less chaotic than it probably was. Ishiguro's popularity across cultures stems from his masterfully crafted stories touching so poignantly these commonly felt dilemmas between attachment and freedom.

Email comments to vamead@well.com.

AM's Writing > NEVER LET ME GO