Aug 31

Aug 31 Never Let Me Go

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Publisher: Vintage
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

From Booker Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro comes a devastating novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss.

As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules—and teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.

Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life, and for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them so special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is another classic by the author of The Remains of the Day.

TL;DR Review

Never Let Me Go is a quietly eerie, thought-provoking book with a strong first-person narrator. It’s engaging and will stick with you long after you finish it.

For you if: You like books that ask ethical questions.

Full Review

I’m late to the Ishiguro party (my first book of his was Klara and the Sun), but several people recommended Never Let Me Go as a beloved backlist title of his. I went in with few expectations and little knowledge about the plot, which I think was a good way to do it. I definitely enjoyed it, but it’s also proven to be one of those books you appreciate even more as time goes by and you think back about it later.

I won’t give too much away, but the book is written in the first person by a character named Kathy H. She’s speaking directly to us, her readers, telling us a mostly linear account of her time at school with her friends, and then what happened to them as they aged. That makes it sound boring and straightforward, but the society that Kathy lives in is not quite like our own, and she and her friends are not like you and me (except they also are, which is kind of the point).

Once again, Ishiguro has blown me away by his ability to write for an entire book in a very distinct character voice; Kath and Klara sound nothing like one another, and wholly like themselves. Going by prose alone, you might not even know it was the same author. But of course, it’s all Ishiguro, and the two books have similar thematic threads, both being a sort of subversion of the dystopian genre in which there are troubling technological advancements and humanitarian issues at play, but no attempts to "overthrow” them. Only a sort of melancholy acceptance that makes the books even more disquieting. This one, in particular, makes you think more about how you may be a cog in a machine, what you may be complacent in, and how much agency you actually have. That, and ethics in modern (and future) medicine.

The one thing that bothered me about this book was how Kathy H. constantly told us she was about to tell us something. It seemed like every few pages she was like, “or at least that’s what I thought … until what happened next” (implied DUN DUN DUUUUN). But ultimately that’s a small complaint.

While I’m not sure this became an all-time favorite like it was for some of my friends, I’m really glad I read it and definitely recommend it. It’s one that will stick with you for a long time.