Lit Hub Does Kazuo Ishiguro’s "Never Let Me Go"

Yes, Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for Literature, is probably famous for Remains of the Day, but I prefer Never Let Me Go. I read all of my Ishiguro novels in prison, which is not to say I read all of his work. You may find another you like better.

But I think LitHub's Simple, Sparse and Profound: David Sexton on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go makes a case for the novel:

Ostensibly a work of science fiction, Never Let Me Go is really nothing of the kind. Ishiguro says he’s perfectly open to people reading it as a chilling warning about biotechnology but feels they’ve missed the inner heart of the book if they take it that way. He has certainly given readers nothing to foster such a misread­ing. For the book is set in the past, not the future: “England, late 1990s” it is specified before the novel begins.

The narrator, Kathy H, is thirty-one as the book opens, and has been a “carer” for nearly twelve years. She looks back to her time at a school she remains very proud to have attended, Hailsham, recalling first when she and her friends were children there, and then when they were teenagers, so locating it in the early and later Seventies, perhaps. Then in Part Two, she tells us about their lives afterwards, in “the Cottages” as young adults, perhaps in the early Eighties. But such dating is never precise and there are few contemporary references. There is almost no allusion to technology, beyond humdrum cars, Rovers and Volvos, and old-fashioned cassette tapes and Walkmans.

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And everything about the way in which it is written, from that absence of technology to the conversational, unremarkable language in which Kathy tells us her story, is calculated to bring it home to us that these are our own lives we are contemplating. In his invariably clear and modest way, Ishiguro describes this radical narrative thus: “The strategy here is that we’re looking at a very strange world, at a very strange group of people, and gradually, I wanted people to feel they’re not looking at such a strange world, that this is everybody’s story.”

As in all Ishiguro’s novels, he never explicitly states the condi­tions of life he is depicting but asks readers to realize what they are for themselves, to gather much not just from what is said but from what is not said as well. This internalizes the world of the novel for the reader in quite a different way from a more overt telling. His great admirer Hanya Yanagihara has spoken of his “remarkable way of using the white space —a lot of writers feel they have to say something all at once on the page, they’re maximalists and he’s not. He’s relying on the reader to understand what is happening off the page.”

Maybe that will get you to read the whole essay, if not get the novel. I bet you get the book when you do read the full essay.  Then you learn what I did: great story.

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