Never Let Me Go: seductive, suspenseful, & devastating
Title: Never Let Me Go
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Pages: 288
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐(and a half)
Who will like it? Although this book might not make you cry so that your eyes become puffy the next morning, it invokes a deep sense of discomfort in me watching the characters grow up, come of age, fall apart, fall together, and face their ultimate destinies with pacific acceptance. This story is painful to receive and hard to tuck away. It’s compelling how Ishiguro can say so much about people, who they themselves say so little. Seductive, suspenseful, and devastating.
Kathy H., a carer in her 30s in a dystopian society, reminisces on her life and her childhood, as she faces her own death. In a sense, all of our lives are linked together by the vacuum-like gap between our expectations and reality. Kathy once looked into the future, so firm and established, as if looking at her past. Even though she can be dejected by all her dreams that cannot happen, we can also glance back at what was secured through her childhood in Hailsham, a boarding school different from the rest.
We don’t often realize how much worse things can be. Sitting here, living life moment by moment, it is easy to forget how lucky we are to even be educated and cultured, to be able to do our laundry, to have good living conditions that 1 billion other people on this planet would easily trade with us in a heartbeat.
Carers and donors in Never Let Me Go have their lives shortened, concentrated, so the edges are cut away and they are quietly living in the centre. They live with a more acute understanding that their time on earth is limited. Kathy watches as people dearest to her struggle with frailty and slowly succumb to death while entirely conscious of its process. That makes the small moments all the more precious because no one can ever know when something will be the last time.
Think about it. Some things in life, you never know that it will be for the last time, the time when you do it. Picking up your child. Standing in a special space for a special moment.
When we look back, maybe our lives are led by a foolish or daft thread of hope. We dreamed about a future that wasn’t possible for us. But lingering in sunlight and hope, and the impossibilities that bridge us together in friendship is maybe what made life worth living for the students of Hailsham. When they look back and see all the could-have-been’s with both regret and longing, they accept the past as it is, with anger and outburst, kicking a tree, wading in mud, screaming at the top of their lungs, but then they loosen. They identify with it and accept it.
This novel by Ishiguro is a masterpiece. The words used are remarkably simple. The language is conversational, relaxed, precise. Intimacy between the narrator, Kath, and the reader is direct. Somehow, Ishiguro portrays the most delicate and fine emotions that I wasn’t aware of existing. The writing is sensitive and almost ductile. I didn’t comprehend something this fine could be pinpointed with an ethereal needle, to touch a specific spot in someone else’s heart, and to share this fragment of emotion wholly.
When commenting on her friendship with Ruth, a cocky, eminent, and elaborate girl with a soft heart, Kath mentions,“The way it is, it’s like there’s a line with us on one side and Ruth on the other, and when all’s said and done, I feel sad about that, and I think she would too if she could see it.” This is a prime example of the waterfall of emotions Ishiguro flicks open with a select few words. “Sad” is underwhelming. It paves way for an amalgamation of emotions all at once — nostalgia, regret, acceptance, pain, emptiness, defiance, and compliance, labelling more feelings than can be traced, in a fourth dimension of space, reaching the reader through the words, but without travelling through that passageway. Ishiguro unequivocally says more with his words than what is visible sparsely on the page.
