review

Never Let Me Go

a book Review by Nick Jackson

Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

New York : Alfred A Knopf

April, 2005

ISBN: 1400043395

List Price: $24.00

“Never Let Me Go” is a science fiction story set in an alternative world to present- day England. Structured as an oral history from a thirty-one-year-old woman, it tells the story of a special group of children as they grow to young adulthood in a British boarding school. The children are special because they are clones who have been raised to provide body parts for the rest of society. They will not live to reach middle age.

Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of 1989’s “Remains of the Day,” slowly unfolds a picture of the complete human spirit as it is housed in the bodies of people raised only for “donations.” In the context of their world, the boarding school children also are special because their “guardians” believe they are operating a particularly humane facility in comparison to almost all others. Possibly similar rationalizations would arise within farmers who raise pampered pigs in luxury apartments. Before they are sent to slaughter.

As the reader’s understanding grows about the predicament faced by the children, anxiety also deepens that they must escape. But the children and young adults cannot conceive of any such rebellion. They live in a society which has completely encircled them with justification and impenetrable indoctrination. Ishiguro masterfully shows his readers what it must be like to grow up as less-than-human. Not so speculative a prospect.

“Never Let Me Go” is a 2006 American Library Association Alex Award winner.

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