Never Let Me Go

"Shortlist"

"Never Let Me Go is an unusual book. I guess it’s speculative fiction , or science fiction . I don’t really know where you would put it in the genre landscape. A lot of people see this book as one that explores lost opportunities, but I never really read it like that. For me, it’s a book that’s about the hypocrisy of adults. It’s set in a school, Hailsham, where the students are protected ‘for their own good’ from knowledge of the adult world. Information is never divulged to the students directly, but leaked to them, so that they gain slow acceptance of their fate. Even if you’re not about to get your organs harvested, I think the book accurately reflects how the adult world feels so tantalisingly close as an adolescent, and the secrecy surrounding the adult world— little snippets of it are revealed to you, but never actually discussed. There’s all this inference at play. And then there’s the adults’ attitudes towards sexuality… The teachers say, ‘Oh, sex is healthy and a great thing to do… but don’t do it.’ Something about the hypocrisy of the adult messaging in that novel is so poignant, even though the setting and situation itself is so outside of everyday experience. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The other thing that’s always struck me about that book is how, as we see often in coming of age novels—especially boarding school novels, where you have a closed environment—your friendships become your whole world. At the point in the novel where Ruth and Tommy become a couple, Kathy is shut out of their relationship. They have an intimacy she has no access to, and the novel explores her intense loneliness, it’s so isolating. So the novel depicts a painfully relatable experience, even though it’s such a specific set up. Absolutely. I also think that, in this novel, there’s a strong sense of nostalgia and foreboding mixed together, or innocence and foreboding, which is so reflective of that adolescent experience. I didn’t take away from the book what everyone else did—I didn’t feel sorry for Kathy and Tommy, their lost love. Because the whole point was that it was a mirage, you know? And so much of adulthood is a mirage. School can’t adequately prepare you for the ‘real’ world, only for the version of the world that adults are willing to project."

"Never Let Me Go sits at the opposite pole from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell , in that it really belongs in the science fiction world, and is in many ways gritty and crushingly grim. It’s a difficult book to talk about because one almost doesn’t want to give away the premise, which drops on you like a ton of bricks around page eighty or so… It’s set at a very unusual boarding school where the students are being raised and educated for the absolute darkest of purposes, which they initially have no knowledge of or control over, and prove ultimately unable to escape from. You can only sit and watch them go to meet their inevitable fates. I feel like it’s a book about the inescapability of death, and the particular way it comes to you in late capitalism. If you could choose to project yourself into any of these books, it would be your last pick, because it is very unromantic in its depiction of the academic world, but it is still a world in which knowledge leads to great pain and suffering and darkness. I think in most of these books, there is a fateful choice that the hero makes to partake of forbidden knowledge. What’s distinctive about Never Let Me Go is that the children have no choice. It’s thrust upon them, and they just have to sit and wait to be devoured by it. Yes – it goes beyond anxiety, to resignation. It’s a painful book to read, one that I don’t know if I’ll ever reread, but I’ll never forget that experience."

"I've just begun Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro — both very good, very different."

"I love books that leave me weeping inside. 'A Little Life,' by Hanya Yanagihara, 'Room,' by Emma Donoghue, 'Never Let Me Go,' by Kazuo Ishiguro, 'Beloved,' by Toni Morrison, and 'Sophie's Choice,' by William Styron, destroyed me in all the best ways."

"Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterly “Never Let Me Go” is old-money dystopian S.F."

"Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go." It's about an idyllic English boarding school where everyone is doing these amazing art projects, but something seems sort of off."

"I read it last year and I was so smitten that I changed my syllabus so that I could require my grad students to read it and talk about it as much as I wanted."