Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Fiction
As a child, all Kathy H. knows is Hailsham, the boarding
school where she grows up with the same people, all of whom are also students
or teachers. Hailsham keeps Kathy in a bubble by physically isolating her from
the outside world, but Kathy is also kept in an information bubble, oblivious
to the role that she and her peers play as donors. Ishiguro paints an alternate
universe of England during the 1990s, where children like Kathy and those at
Hailsham are created to be a source of organs for others. As Kathy grows up and begins to explore the
outside world, she keeps on revisiting her memories at Hailsham. As Kathy gets
older and the prospect of her time as a donor draws near, the more she thinks
of Hailsham and the more she wishes that Hailsham will never let her go.
Ishiguro’s
writing is evocative and his novel beautifully and brilliantly traverses so
many different issues. Never Let Me Go is a coming-of-age novel, a love
story, a cautionary tale, and a social critique. The novel provokes difficult questions --
whether ignorance is bliss, how to create an identity when a life path has been
pre-established, and whether there can ever be true autonomy in a world that is
eerily similar to ours. It was one of
the best novels I’ve read all year – maybe ever – and I’ll be thinking about it
for a long time.
