Book Review: Never Let Me Go

I almost combined my review of Never Let Me Go with my review for the movie Hanna, not just because both works involve "different" children but also because they both suffer the effects of having protagonists whose emotional spectrums have been stifled by their upbringings, and who therefore can't convey a full range of emotions to us, the reader or viewer. This is less of an issue in Never Let Me Go than it is in Hanna, as the former has many instances where we feel sympathy for the characters not necessarily from the emotions they express but from the circumstances they endure, but the final result is the same: if the young assassin in Hanna, or the narrator Kathy in Never Let Me Go, is able to face adversity with nothing but a stiff upper lip, then why shouldn't we, as well?

I should say first and foremost that Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of Never Let Me Go, is an excellent writer who is clearly capable of maintaining a strong narrative with an air of the unspoken, giving his readers just enough information to keep us interested while withholding enough to keep us guessing as to the true nature of the story until the very end, and my ultimate problem with Never Let Me Go is in no way a result of any shortcoming on his part; rather, it's because he stays so true to the narrative he's created that I was left feeling somewhat let down by the way the characters of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy accept their fates without much of a fight. Perhaps it's because I've never been a big fan of stories wherein the main characters' doom (such as it is) is a foregone conclusion, but although I didn't guess every aspect of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy's story from the very beginning, I guessed enough of it that I was left waiting for some unexpected twist, some real glimmer of hope, that never arrives. I'm not going to say what happens to the characters, or why they're leading the lives they lead, but from the very first page, the tone of Kathy's narrative alone is enough to tell any astute reader that he's not going to turn the last page with a smile on his face.

With that being said, Never Let Me Go is still a good book that's well worth reading for the way Ishiguro brings the relationships between his characters to the surface and lets those relationships dominate the plot, rather than the other way around. The subject matter of Never Let Me Go is basically horrific, but the book is neither a horror novel nor pure science-fiction, although it has definite sci-fi undertones; instead, what Ishiguro achieves is his own specific type of magical realism, where magic is replaced by a dystopian vision of our own reality and where our notions of the sanctity of human life are turned on their heads, yet the ways in which Kathy, Ruth and Tommy relate to one another are really no different from the way they would relate in a world exactly like ours. Their motivations may be different, but their emotions -- muted as they might be -- are one and the same.

As a side note, I haven't yet seen the film adaptation of Never Let Me Go starring Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan, but the video above features the song used in the film to represent the fictional song "Never Let Me Go" (by the fictional singer Judy Bridgewater) that plays an integral part in the novel, and from which the novel derives its name. Additionally, the Florence + The Machine album Ceremonials came out around the time I was reading Never Let Me Go, and it also features a song entitled "Never Let Me Go," the lyrics of which are strikingly appropriate for the story.