The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
reviewed by Stephen Bernstein

Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go. Knopf, 2005. 287 pp. $24.00.

Never Let Me Go begins at Hailsham, a serene but unusual private school in the English countryside. There Kathy H., the narrator, grows up with her two closest friends, Tommy and Ruth. In this sheltered environment all three characters entertain numerous questions about the “guardians” who administer their educations, about the mysterious character “Madame” who occasionally appears to take away the students’ art projects, and about their rigidly structured futures as “carers” and “donors.” Though Kathy tells her story in England in the late 1990s, this is a speculative England, one where our own questions about class difference, medical ethics, and social responsibility are rephrased in dramatic and troubling ways. Kazuo Ishiguro’s penchant for the slow revelation of a first-person narrator’s inner secrets continues in this, his sixth novel. In The Remains of the Day Ishiguro’s narrator, Stevens, displays a willful self-repression as thematically important as anything he reveals. Christopher Banks, the narrator of When We Were Orphans, only fitfully comes to grips with his personal history. In Kathy, Ishiguro has created a similar voice but in a world palpably less exotic and broad than Orphans’ Shanghai. Kathy’s present day is a world of highways, service areas, and the “recovery centers” where she does her work. Her medium is memory, and as her life changes and she comes to understand the possibilities and limits of love, she is able to unfold her painful history. Ishiguro has perfected a narratorial voice capable of rendering this story in the most affecting way; the sheer narrowness of Kathy’s experience is unmistakable in her voice and increases the pathos of her existence. The result is a powerful and sad narrative. Ishiguro’s—and Kathy’s—brave new world is one whose lingering implications we will do well to take to heart.